Transfers of ownership rights: An empirical study of five European countries

We study transfers of ownership rights, completed between 1996 and 2004, in five major European countries. We use the traditional literature on corporate governance systems to identify expected groups of countries. Results from the supervised cluster analysis show significant dissimilarities between deals according to the target country. These dissimilarities correspond to the traditional classification of corporate governance systems. An exception is Spain. We show dissimilarities between two groups of countries. There are, on the one hand, deals concerning French, German and, to a lesser extent, Italian targets, and, on the other hand, deals concerning British and Spanish targets. This result reflects recent studies, which stress the new situation of the Spanish corporate governance system which now follows British practice more closely.