The introductory chapter presents an overview of the book. It starts with the basic research questions and the objectives of the book. One of the main objectives is to make available systematic and comparable accounts of ownership structure change (respectively, persistence) in large firms in eight European countries over the last few decades. The second main objective is to examine the likely determinants of ownership structure change in each country. The third objective is to apply an international comparative approach to ownership structure changes to shed some light on the questions of whether similar forces impact ownership change or persistence in each country, whether particular institutional factors influence ownership change/persistence, and whether the eventual decline of corporate insiders and the state and the rise of foreign and institutional investors are influenced by similar forces in each country. The chapter provides an overview of the global corporate governance revolution in the 1990s as well as its countervailing forces. It discusses the theoretical assumptions about the determinants of corporate ownership, the data used in the country chapters, and gives an overview over chapter contents. The chapter concludes with cross-country summary, implications for the theory of the firm and policy implications.

The United Kingdom was the first country to develop a code of best practice of corporate governance. This chapter gives a brief overview of UK corporate governance regulation, including recent reforms, followed by a discussion of the listing and disclosure rules. It then performs an empirical study of the control and ownership of the top 20, top 100 and the listed UK companies for two distinct points in time, i.e. the 1990s and 2018–2019. The following patterns emerge. Over the period ranging from the late 1990s to 2018–2019, the percentage of listed companies in the top 20 and top 100 suffered a substantial decrease. In contrast, the percentage of fully owned subsidiaries among the top UK companies shot up from virtually nil to more than half of such companies. Still, the average listed UK company remains widely held in 2018–2019 (Goergen and Renneboog, 2001). The chapter then proceeds by identifying potential determinants explaining the observed ownership changes. The chapter concludes with a number of reflections on how UK corporate ownership and control may change during the post-Brexit period.

In this chapter, we portray the evolution of the ownership and control structure of Italian firms over a period – from early 1990s to date – in which institutional changes, external shocks and reforms affected the economy, the financial system and the legal protection of shareholders. Specifically, we provide a detailed account of the organization forms of Italian companies, the control models of listed and unlisted firms, the identity of the largest shareholder, the role of institutional investors and the control-enhancing mechanisms of family listed firms, which still represent the largest share in the private companies’ segment of the stock exchange.

We find that many features of the ownership structure and the control models are still in place. Italian economy remains characterized by a predominance of SME that rely on banks for external finance, family firms reluctant to go public and release control, high ownership concentration, even among listed firms.

And yet institutional reforms did change the corporate governance system, the transparency and the attitude towards minority investors as pressures from the regulatory authorities led pyramidal groups to shorten the control chains and to dismantle cross-shareholdings, all of which eventually sparked a deep interest by foreign institutional investors in recent years.

This chapter examines ownership and control structures in Austria. As many other European countries, Austria experienced a shake-up in securities law, mainly induced by EU Directives (such as those on shareholder rights, takeovers and transparency). Despite of investor favourable changes in the securities law, ownership concentration remain very high in Austria in listed and unlisted companies alike. Thus, large shareholders remain the predominant corporate governance model in Austria. The identities of the controlling shareholders remained very much the same during the past decades with one important exception, banks. Pyramidal ownership structures have remained prevalent as of 2018–2019 in Austria, since non-financial firms and holding companies together controlled nearly half of the top 100 Austrian firms. Thus, families and individuals which stand behind those companies remained the most important ultimate controlling owners. There was a remarkable decline of state control of listed companies after privatization but the state retained an important role as large and controlling shareholder in many of the largest (listed and unlisted) Austrian companies. While around twenty-five years ago foreign owners already controlled around 20% of the largest Austrian companies, this percentage kept increasing. The chapter discusses the role of ‘complementary institutions’, the preferences of both controlling owners and prospective buyers, and a missing political will to embrace a more shareholder oriented model.

In this chapter, for the first time in Israel, I examine the main trends in aggregate concentration – the share of economic activity that is accounted for by the largest business entities (corporations, business groups, etc.) – from the mid-1990s to 2015, focusing on the developments in its main components – concentration of production, industrial concentration, and concentration of corporate control (means of production). Using the input–output framework, I find that the process of technological changes and adjustments in the economy, in recent decades, has been translated into increasing density of the production function, and the creation of a few key industries and industry clusters. The level of industrial concentration in these central industries remained high but relatively stable. The main conclusion, however, is that, during the reviewed period, aggregate concentration in Israel declined – due to decentralization of the control over firms and dismantling of complex ownership structures (business groups) – as a result of structural reforms instituted by the Israeli government. Against this background, with dismantling of the business groups, stand-alone mega-corporations became the main centers of economic power. As in other advanced economies, these corporations have a significant, increasing impact on the distribution and level of activity of the market, and hence on its present and future level of concentration.