Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain

Abstract

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.