A Comparison among the director networks in the main listed companies in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom

Paolo Santella (), Carlo Drago, Andrea Polo and Enrico Gagliardi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on director interlocks by illustrating and analysing the interlocking directorships among the Italian, French, German, UK and US listed Blue Chips. The comparison of the five countries considered shows that two national models stand out. On the one hand a model made of a high number of companies linked to each other through a small number of shared directors who serve on several company boards at the time (France, Germany, and Italy). On the other hand, in the UK much fewer companies are connected to each other essentially through directors who have no more than two board positions at the time. A case in between is represented by the US, where a high number of companies are connected to each other just like Germany, France, and Italy. However, just like the UK, such connections are made through directors who tend to have just two board positions at the time, a sign that, differently from Italy, Germany, and France, the UK and US networks might not be functional to systemic collusion.

Keywords: corporate governance; interlocking directorships; antitrust; competition; social network analysis (SNA); exploratory data analysis (EDA); empirical corporate finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C0 C1 G3 L1 L4 M2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/16397/1/MPRA_paper_16397.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:16397

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().