Suchergebnisse

In the fully revised second edition of 'Market Liquidity', Thierry Foucault, Marco Pagano, and Ailsa Röell offer a comprehensive take on the liquidity of securities markets, its determinants, and its effects. Including new illustrative examples of market malfunction and novel insights from recent research on security markets, the authors bring readers up to speed on changes in market structures and financial regulation. New chapters cover the relationship between financial instability and market liquidity, as well as the role and effects of algorithmic and high-frequency trading.

Since the late seventeenth century, trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve different purposes. Originally set up for administrative convenience, they helped to create liquidity, notably for foreign securities. From the 1930s, their primary purpose became to shield directors of large corporations from shareholder influence and hostile takeover threats. Subsequently, the trust offices evolved from general-purpose administrative units into dedicated foundations closely tied to individual companies and increasingly popular with foreign corporations as cheap anti-takeover devices. Their reincarnation as foundations also turned them into vehicles for the tax-efficient routing of international revenue flows via the Netherlands.

This paper analyses ownership and control structures of Dutch listed companies. Legislation effective since 1992 mandates all shareholders with holdings of 5 percent or more in Dutch companies to disclose their holdings. Our analysis shows that the average ownership stakes of the largest and the three largest shareholders are 27% and 41%, respectively. The average ownership stakes of banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions are relatively low. We observe that voting rights are more concentrated than ownership rights the use of a supervisory board representing interests of different stakeholders is ubiquitous; and listed companies use different forms of antitakeover defence measures.