Investigating the ownership structure of European companies using dynamic network analysis methods

Abstract

The methodology of social network analysis is more and more widely applied to model the formation and development of regional relationships. In our paper, we combine this methodology with the gravity model to examine which factors explain the development of the ownership structure of European companies. For this pur- pose, we employed the Amadeus database of European firms, which contains eco- nomic and ownership information for nearly 24 million companies. The corporate ownership relations were aggregated at the NUTS3 level on an annual basis, and then additional geographical, technological, and socioeconomic data were assigned to the regions thus defined.