Winners of the 2004 ECGI Clinical Paper Competition
Stockholm, 9 December 2004 - The winners of the 2004 ECGI Clinical paper Competition were announced at a ceremony organised by the ECGI, the Journal of Financial Economics (JFE) and the Center for Business and Policy Studies (SNS) with financial support from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation. All six papers were presented to the jury, after which the prizes were awarded by Lars Engwall, Secretary-General of the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.
First prize
First prize went to Julian Franks, London Business School, Colin Mayer, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and Stefano Rossi, London Business School for their paper Ownership: Evolution and Regulation (See Working Paper 9/2003 revised December 2004).
The picture shows (l to r) Stephano Rossi and Julian Franks receiving their First Prize certificates and a cheque for €4,000 from Lars Engwall, Secretary-General of the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.
Summing up the jury's verdict of the winning paper, Professor Claudio Loderer said: "The paper provides a careful and detailed review of the long-run evolution of investor protection, equity financing and corporate ownership in the U.K. over the 20th century. It makes an important contribution to the literature by showing that, unlike what one would have expected, dispersed ownership of large listed companies is not necessarily tied to regulation and laws that protect minority investors. Trust and informal relations could have provided the necessary protection."
Second prize
The second prize of €2,000 went to Frederick H. deB. Harris and Sherry L. Jarrell, Wake Forest University, Thomas H. McInish and Robert A. Wood, University of Memphis for their paper. Minority Shareholder Expropriation and Asymmetric Information Flows in a Global Registered Share: The Saga of DaimlerChrysler (See Working Paper 60/2004)
The picture shows (l to r) Sherry Jarrell, Thomas McInish and Robert Wood receiving their Second Prize certificates and a cheque for €2,000 from Lars Engwall, Secretary-General of the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.
Sherry Jarrell, Thomas McInish and Robert Wood receiving their Second Prize certificates and a cheque for €2,000 from Lars Engwall, Secretary-General of the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation
About this paper, Professor Loderer said: "The paper examines the causes of the significant and puzzling migration of ownership and trading of DaimlerChrysler from New York to Frankfurt after the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz. According to the careful and detailed investigation conducted by the authors, the reason could be the lack of protection afforded to minority shareholders by the corporate governance and disclosure standards of DaimlerChrysler, a company incorporated in Germany. "
Joint third prize
The picture above shows (l to r) Christoph Schneider, Ingolf Dittmann and Ernst Maug, winners of the joint Third Prize.
The third prize of €1,000 was shared between two papers How Preussag became TUI: Kissing too many toads can make you a toad by Ingolf Dittmann, Ernst Maug and Christoph Schneider, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (see Working Paper 58/2004) and Czech Mate: Expropriation and Investor Protection in a Converging World by Mihir A. Desai, Harvard University and NBER and Alberto Moel, Monitor Corporate Finance, Monitor Group (see Working Paper 62/2004).
Christoph Schneider, Ingolf Dittmann and Ernst Maug, winners of the joint Third Prize On the Preussag paper, Professor Loderer said: "The paper investigates the performance of Preussag, a diversified German conglomerate, during 1997-2003. The firm changed its focus from old economy businesses to tourism and logistics. In their thorough analysis, the authors document, among other things, the particular decision-making problems associated with crossholdings; they document the poor governance that arises almost inevitably from combinations of public and private governance; and they argue that managerial discretion over large amounts of liquid resources can be deleterious."
The picture above shows Mihir Desai receiving the joint Third Prize certificate from Lars Engwall, Secretary-General of the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation.
On the Czech Mate paper, Professor Loderer said: "The paper studies the expropriation of a foreign investor by a local partner and the subsequent resolution of that case through international arbitration. The paper carefully shows, among other things, how ownership of shares can be of secondary importance in determining control and how corporate control is shaped by geographical proximity."