The Origins of the German Corporation – Finance, Ownership and Control

The ownership of German corporations is quite different today from that of Anglo-American firms. How did this come about? To what extent is it attributable to regulation? A specially constructed data set on financing and ownership of German corporations from the end of the 19th century reveals that, as in the UK, there was a high degree of activity on German stock markets with firms issuing equity in preference to borrowing from banks, and insider and family ownership declining rapidly. However, unlike in the UK, other companies and banks emerged as the main holders of equity, with banks holding shares primarily as custodians of other investors rather than on their own account. The changing pattern of ownership concentration was therefore very different from that of the UK with regulation reinforcing the control that banks exercised on behalf of other investors

Communicating Processes with Data for Supervisory Coordination

We employ supervisory controllers to safely coordinate high-level discrete(-event) behavior of distributed components of complex systems. Supervisory controllers observe discrete-event system behavior, make a decision on allowed activities, and communicate the control signals to the involved parties. Models of the supervisory controllers can be automatically synthesized based on formal models of the system components and a formalization of the safe coordination (control) requirements. Based on the obtained models, code generation can be used to implement the supervisory controllers in software, on a PLC, or an embedded (micro)processor. In this article, we develop a process theory with data that supports a model-based systems engineering framework for supervisory coordination. We employ communication to distinguish between the different flows of information, i.e., observation and supervision, whereas we employ data to specify the coordination requirements more compactly, and to increase the expressivity of the framework. To illustrate the framework, we remodel an industrial case study involving coordination of maintenance procedures of a printing process of a high-tech Oce printer.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432

Firm performance and managerial turnover: the case of Ukraine

The paper studies whether and how CEO turnover in Ukrainian firms is related to their performance. Based on a novel dataset covering Ukrainian joint stock companies in 2002-2006, the paper finds statistically significant negative association between the past performance of firms measured by return on sales and return on assets, and the likelihood of managerial turnover. While the strength of the turnover-performance relationship does not seem to depend on factors such as managerial ownership and supervisory board size, we do find significant entrenchments effects associated with ownership by managers. Overall, our analysis suggests that corporate governance in Ukraine operates with a certain degree of efficiency, despite the well-known lacunas in the country’s institutional environment

How former business owners fare in the labor market? Job assignment and earnings

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in European Economic Review. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V.This study uses detailed longitudinal matched employer–employee data to examine the impact of entrepreneurial experience on job assignments, careers, and wages. The results suggest that there are significant differences in career mobility between former business owners and workers who were always wage employees. Former business owners enter firms at higher job levels and progress faster up the hierarchy than wage employees without entrepreneurial experience. The majority of the former business owners find jobs in small firms. The return to business ownership experience is lower than the return to wage employee experience, thus suggesting that the labor market imposes a penalty for business ownership experience.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi