Empirical Evidence on the Effect of Shareholder Taxation

Abstract

As has been shown in chapter 2, the question what determines corporate ownership concentration has caught attention in the literature for a long time, starting with the seminal contribution of Berle / Means (1932). Their image of the modern firm, a quasi-public corporation, where a separation of ownership and control has taken place, has dominated the literature until the beginning 1990s. After that, studies comparing ownership concentration around the world have found out, that the Berle / Means image of the widely held firm does not generally hold. Public firms are found to be widely held only in the US and UK. Contrary, corporate ownership in continental Europe is highly concentrated.