Some obvious qualifications are necessary to
render this picture fully accurate. For instance,
while neither the UK nor the US has concentrated
individual block-holders, crossshareholdings
or dominant family-owned
firms in appreciable numbers, as do the Continental
and Japanese systems (Shleifer and
Vishny, 1997), institutional investors’ control
of the equity market as a whole has grown
rapidly in the last 20 years in both countries.
markets (Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Hall and
Soskice, 2001; Streeck and Yamamura, 2001).