Les conditions politiques au développement de la firme managériale

Mark J. Roe

Revue Finance Contrôle Stratégie, 2001, vol. 4, issue 1, pages 123-182

Abstract: The large publicly held firm dominates business in the United States. But in other economically advanced nations, ownership is not diffuse but concentrated. Social democ-racies press managers to stabilize employment. Hence, public firms there will have higher managerial agency costs, and large-block shareholding will persist. Indeed, when we line up the world's richest nations on a left-right political continuum and then line them up on a close-to-diffuse ownership continuum, the two correlate powerfully. We thus uncover not only a political explanation for ownership concentration in Europe, but also a crucial political prerequisite to the rise of the public firm in the United States, namely the weakness of social democratic pressures on the American business firm.

Keywords: agency costs; large public firm; social democracy; ownership structure. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G38 K22 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001

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