We examine the current state of the U.S. public corporation and how it has evolved over the last 40 years. After falling by 50 percent since its peak in 1997, the number of public corporations is now smaller than 40 years ago. These corporations are now much larger and over the last twenty years...

Doidge, Karolyi, and Stulz (2017) show that from 1999 to 2012 the US develops a listing gap relative to other countries, meaning that it has abnormally few publicly listed firms. In this paper, we update their evidence to 2023 and find that the listing gap increases, but at a low rate. By 2023,...