The Unsung Activists: UK Shareholder Investigation Committees, 1888–1940
研究了1888-1940年间英国股东如何通过调查委员会克服搭便车问题，对董事会不当行为构成可信威胁，有助于理解伦敦在所有权与控制权分离方面的领先地位。
As companies became larger and shareholders more numerous in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, the conventional wisdom is that the free-rider problem inhibited active shareholder participation. Discontented shareholders could sell in the market, but it was long before the takeover bid mechanism facilitated the removal of underperforming incumbent boards. We show, using a sample of fifty cases in the period from 1888 to 1940, that UK shareholders overcame the free-rider problem by using committees of investigation on a sufficiently large scale to present a credible threat to board malfeasance. Although there was more to corporate performance than corporate governance, this aspect of good governance plausibly contributed to London's precocity in divorcing ownership from control in domestic companies up to World War II.