This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of blockholders (large shareholders) in … corporate governance. We start with the underlying property rights of public corporations; we discuss how blockholders are … critical in addressing free-rider problems and why, like owners of private property in general, blockholders are likely to be …

. Second, when they do buy private targets or public targets with blockholders, they tend not to use all-equity offers, which …

This chapter documents the evolution of ownership and control of firms around the world over a hundred year period from … stock markets and contrasts these with the persistent patterns of ownership that are observed in many countries around the … world. In particular, it documents the growth in dispersion in ownership that took place in many countries from the early …

Canadian firms have different roots (e.g., more concentrated ownership and smaller size) than U.S. firms and Canadian …

, especially when ownership is concentrated. …

. Common wisdom is that multi-firm ownership weakens governance because the blockholder is spread too thinly. We show that this … underperformance. Common ownership leads to firms' stock prices being correlated, even if their fundamentals are uncorrelated. We …

We study how share repurchases affect the ownership stake of outside blockholders in 950 publicly-traded US … that share repurchases tend to make outside ownership less concentrated: repurchasing 1% of outstanding common equity …