IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v76y2016i01p1-40_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain

Author

Listed:
  • Acheson, Graeme G.
  • Campbell, Gareth
  • Turner, John D.
  • Vanteeva, Nadia

Abstract

Scholars have long debated whether ownership matters for firm performance. The standard view regarding Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on performance. In this article, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial expropriation. Contrastingly, we find that directors who were independent of large owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.

Suggested Citation

  • Acheson, Graeme G. & Campbell, Gareth & Turner, John D. & Vanteeva, Nadia, 2016. "Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 76(1), pages 1-40, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:76:y:2016:i:01:p:1-40_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050716000450/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hannah, Leslie & Foreman-Peck, James S., 2023. "Business Forms and Business Performance in UK Manufacturing 1871-81," MPRA Paper 119447, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Maria Aluchna & Tomasz Kuszewski, 2021. "Do Financial Investors Mitigate Agency Problems? Evidence from an Emerging Market," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(2), pages 872-888.
    3. van Hombeeck, Carlos Eduardo, 2020. "An exorbitant privilege in the first age of international financial integration?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    4. B. Zorina Khan, 2017. "Related Investing: Corporate Ownership and Capital Mobilization during Early Industrialization," NBER Working Papers 23052, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Turner, John D., 2024. "Three centuries of corporate governance in the UK," QUCEH Working Paper Series 24-01, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:76:y:2016:i:01:p:1-40_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jeh .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.