Using ownership and control data for 890 firm‐years, this article examines the concentration of capital and voting rights in British companies in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find that both capital and voting rights were diffuse by modern‐day standards. However, this does not necessarily mean that there was a modern‐style separation of ownership from control in Victorian Britain. One major implication of our findings is that diffuse ownership was present in the UK much earlier than previously thought, and given that it occurred in an era with weak shareholder protection law, it somewhat undermines the influential law and finance hypothesis. We also find that diffuse ownership is correlated with large boards, a London head office, non‐linear voting rights, and shares traded on multiple markets.

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Scholars have long debated whether ownership matters for firm performance. The standard view regarding Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on performance. In this article, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial expropriation. Contrastingly, we find that directors who were independent of large owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.

This paper argues that Russia's choice of economic organization, which is based on the renewed role of the state, is a response to the existence of severe transaction costs, and subsequent mitigation of contractual incompleteness in the absence of a strong proper ty -ness classes in Russia, reducing the necessity for appropriate market infrastructure. This also implied that if Russia's political and economic system had more than one competing hierarchy, the objective of the elites would not have entailed long-term economic growth, as gains from short-term wealth tunneling would have been much larger. As in and long-term to maturity, under a weak legal system a new substitute governing mechanism, which took form of the state-private co-partnership system, has arisen in order to reduce hold-up costs leading to high levels of underinvestment.reserved. P21, P26, P37 state corporatism, industry growth, property rights, Russia.