According to the general principles defined by Thomas David and Gerharda Westerhuis in order to insure comparability between countries, we have selected the ca. 50 biggest French financial and the ca. 200 biggest French non-financial firms for each benchmark date. Due to constraints in our sources, we however departed from studies on other countries by always choosing share capital as our sampling criterion. Other minor peculiarities of our sampling scheme can be found in the Sources and Methods file.
The total number of sample firms is as follows:
1911: 245
1928: 236
1937: 241
1956: 255
1979: 247
1990: 252
2000: 250
While the exact names of positions varied a lot between firms, especially before World War II, we generally included all board members (members of the conseil d’administration, that had a quite flexible role, more or less executive or control-like, depending on firms), plus the two or three top executives, even when the source did not clearly include them in the board.
We systematically gathered and coded data on many attributes of firms. Those that we used in our chapter attributes can be found in the Sources and Methods file.
Some first results can also be found in the Sources and Methods file.
