TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bodenhorn,Howard
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Voting Rights, Share Concentration, and Leverage at Nineteenth-Century US Banks
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2012///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - February 2012; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Studies of corporate governance are concerned with two features of modern shareholding: diffuse ownership and the resulting separation of ownership and control, which potentially leads to  managerial self-dealing; and, majority shareholding, which potentially mitigates some managerial self-dealing but opens the door for the expropriation of minority shareholders. This paper provides a study of the second issue for nineteenth-century US corporations. It investigates two related questions. First, did voting rules that limited the control rights of large shareholders encourage diffuse ownership? It did. Second, did diffuse ownership systematically alter bank risk taking? It did.  Banks with less concentrated ownership followed policies that reduced liquidity and bankruptcy risk
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w17808
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w17808
ER  -