Economische analyse van ondernemingsgroepen.Een literatuuroverzicht

Corporate groups are found all around the world but their scopes, goals and effects might be very divergent. In this paper, we overview the existing international literature on corporate groups, and furthermore we pay special attention to European and Belgian corporate groups, where the presence of so-called blockholders is characteristic. An important category of blockholders in European groups are holding companies. And these, on their turn, might play a crucial role on the internal capital market functioning in the group. Potential access to such internal capital markets, which is one of the consequences of being part of a corporate group, can have an important impact on the group members. Therefore, we also take a look at the value creation or value destroying effect of these internal capital markets.