IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sbs/wpsefe/2004fe14.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Demise of Investment-Banking Partnerships: Theory and Evidence

Author

Listed:
  • Alan D. Morrison
  • William J. Wilhelm

Abstract

Until 1970, the New York Stock Exchange prohibited public incorporation of member firms. After the rules were relaxed to allow joint stock firm membership, investment-banking concerns organized as partnerships or closely-held private corporations went public in waves, with Goldman Sachs (1999) the last of the bulge bracket banks to float. In this paper we ask why the Investment Banks chose to float after 1970, and why they did so in waves. Our explanation extends previous work which examined the role of partnerships in fostering the formation of human capital (Morrison and Wilhelm, 2003). We examine in this context the effect of technological innovations which serve to replace or to undermine the role of the human capitalist and hence we provide a technological theory of the partnership’s going-public decision. We support our theory with a new dataset of investment bank partnership statistics.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan D. Morrison & William J. Wilhelm, 2004. "The Demise of Investment-Banking Partnerships: Theory and Evidence," OFRC Working Papers Series 2004fe14, Oxford Financial Research Centre.
    • Handle: RePEc:sbs:wpsefe:2004fe14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.finance.ox.ac.uk/file_links/finecon_papers/2004fe14.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Natália Monteiro & Geoff Stewart, 2015. "Scale, Scope and Survival: A Comparison of Cooperative and Capitalist Modes of Production," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer;The Industrial Organization Society, vol. 47(1), pages 91-118, August.
    2. Steven N. Kaplan & Joshua Rauh, 2010. "Wall Street and Main Street: What Contributes to the Rise in the Highest Incomes?," NBER Chapters, in: Corporate Governance, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. repec:dau:papers:123456789/2945 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. John Thanassoulis, 2011. "Bankers' Pay Structure And Risk," Economics Series Working Papers 545, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    5. John Thanassoulis, 2012. "The Case for Intervening in Bankers’ Pay," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(3), pages 849-895, June.
    6. James Crotty, 2009. "The Bonus-Driven “Rainmaker” Financial Firm: How These Firms Enrich Top Employees, Destroy Shareholder Value and Create Systemic Financial Instability," UMASS Amherst Economics Working Papers 2009-13, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Economics.
    7. James Crotty, 2010. "The Bonus-Driven “Rainmaker” Financial Firm: How These Firms Enrich Top Employees, Destroy Shareholder Value and Create Systemic Financial Instability (revised)," Working Papers wp209_revised3, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sbs:wpsefe:2004fe14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Maxine Collett (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frcoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.