“Common Ownership” is a phenomenon where shareholders hold substantial stakes in firms that impose externalities on each other. The “Common Ownership” hypothesis suggests that these shareholders may internalize some of these externalities amongst their portfolio firms. While most of the...

We examine whether institutions' monitoring effectiveness is related to the number of their blockholdings. We find that the number of blocks that a firm's large institutions hold is positively associated with forced chief executive officer (CEO) turnover-performance sensitivity, abnormal returns...

We argue that a fundamental reason for the short term perspective of corporate executives is the short-term orientation of shareholders and financial markets that drive the performance benchmarks of CEOs. In our view, long-term committed shareholders can provide substantial benefits to the...

This is a Chapter contributing to the Research Handbook on Executive Compensation. In the quest for possible causes of the recent financial crisis, commentators often argue that bank executives had poor incentives. Critics claim, in particular, that executive compensation was not properly...

The literature suggests that while decentralized decision-making can allow for greater specialization in an organization, it heightens the cost of coordinating decisions. The mutual fund industry – in particular, sole- and team-managed balanced funds – provides an ideal setting to test the...

A regulator who designs a public stress test to avert default of a distressed bank via private investment must account for large investors' private information on the bank's state. We provide conditions for crowding-in (crowding-out) so that the regulator offers more (less) information to...

In this study we examine the relation between corporate governance and institutional ownership. Our empirical results show that the fraction of a company's shares that are held by institutional investors increases with the quality of its governance structure. In a similar vein, we show that the...

We show that both the number of institutional investors and the percentage of shares that are held by institutional investors increase significantly after reverse splits with a pre-split price lower than $5 and a target price higher than $5. This effect is larger than for other comparable...

Using exogenous wealth shocks stemming from the collapse of the housing market, we show that managers who experience substantial losses in their home values subsequently reduce the risk in their delegated funds. The decline in fund risk comes through reductions in idiosyncratic risk and tracking...

This paper examines heterogeneity in blockholder monitoring across investor type. We document which blockholder types (e.g. mutual funds, hedge funds) are more likely to be associated with active monitoring and show that firms targeted by such blockholders are more likely to increase the equity...