IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this paper

Mutuality and Corporate Governance: The Evolution of UK Building Societies Following Deregulation

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • J.Cook
  • S.Deakin
  • A.Hughes

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of deregulation following the UK Building Societies Act 1986, which opened the way for competition between building societies and commercial banks and introduced a procedure for the demutualisation of a building society. it is argued that the Act brought about a rearrangement of property rights which destabilised the building society form. A wave of demutualisations followed in the 1990's. the beneficiaries of change included corporate managers whose earnings and status were enhanced following conversion, and speculative investors who profitted from windfall gains. These were set against losses to borrowers, in the form of higher costs of loans, and to communities, in the form of reduced diversity of services. There is no guarentee that the recent trajectory of the sector is one of evolution to efficiency. Rather, its experience illustrates the often enexpected consequences for corporate governance of changes in regulation and property rights.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: https://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/centre-for-business-research/downloads/working-papers/wp205.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Paper provided by Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge in its series Working Papers with number wp205.

as
in new window

Length:
Date of creation: Jun 2001
Handle: RePEc:cbr:cbrwps:wp205
Note: PRO-2
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk

Keywords: corporate governance; deregulation; mutuality; property rights; building societies; demutualisation; path dependence.;

Find related papers by JEL classification:

  • K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Business and Securities Law
  • L31 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as
in new window


  1. Lamm-Tennant, Joan & Starks, Laura T, 1993. "Stock versus Mutual Ownership Structures: The Risk Implications," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 66(1), pages 29-46, January.
  2. Fama, Eugene F & Jensen, Michael C, 1983. "Separation of Ownership and Control," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(2), pages 301-325, June.
  3. Oliver Hart & John Moore, 1998. "Cooperatives vs. outside ownership," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 19360, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  4. Fama, Eugene F & Jensen, Michael C, 1983. "Agency Problems and Residual Claims," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(2), pages 327-349, June.
  5. Howard Jarman, 1998. "Building Societies: Some Suggestions for Reform," The Service Industries Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(2), pages 161-176, April.
  6. J. David Cummins & Mary A. Weiss & Hongmin Zi, 1998. "Organizational form and efficiency: an analysis of stock and mutual property-liability insurers," Working Papers 98-19, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
  7. Thompson, Steve, 1997. "Takeover activity among financial mutuals: An analysis of target characteristics," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(1), pages 37-53, January.
  8. David T LLEWELLYN & Mark J HOLMES, 1991. "In Defence Of Mutuality: A Redress To An Emerging Conventional Wisdom," Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(3), pages 319-354, 07.
  9. Hilary Ingham & Steve Thompson, 1994. "Paying for performance: Efficiency wages and mutuality," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 15(4), pages 279-289, July/Augu.
  10. Ingham, Hilary & Thompson, Steve, 1995. "Mutuality, Performance and Executive Compensation," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 57(3), pages 295-308, August.
  11. Barry Howcroft, 1999. "Mutuality versus Public Company - the Debate in Europe and the USA," Corporate Governance: An International Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 7(2), pages 167-177, 04.
  12. Patricia Born & William M. Gentry & W. Kip Viscusi & Richard J. Zeckhauser, 1998. "Organizational Form and Insurance Company Performance: Stocks versus Mutuals," NBER Chapters,in: The Economics of Property-Casualty Insurance, pages 167-192 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Luigi Zingales, 1997. "Corporate Governance," NBER Working Papers 6309, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  14. Kevin Amess & Barry Howcroft, 2001. "Corporate Governance Structures and the Comparative Advantage of Credit Unions," Corporate Governance: An International Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(1), pages 59-65, 01.
  15. J. David Cummins & Mary A. Weiss & Hongmin Zi, 1999. "Organizational Form and Efficiency: The Coexistence of Stock and Mutual Property-Liability Insurers," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 45(9), pages 1254-1269, September.
  16. Mayers, David & Shivdasani, Anil & Smith, Clifford W, Jr, 1997. "Board Composition and Corporate Control: Evidence from the Insurance Industry," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 70(1), pages 33-62, January.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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

as
in new window


Cited by:

  1. Jean-Noël Ory & Mireille Jaeger & Emmanuelle Gurtner, 2006. "La banque à forme coopérative peut-elle soutenir durablement la compétition avec la banque SA?," Revue Finance Contrôle Stratégie, revues.org, vol. 9(2), pages 121-157, June.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cbr:cbrwps:wp205. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ruth Newman and Georgie Cohen)

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.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.