Previous work on exit in declining industries has neglected mergers. We examine a simple model that predicts which declining industries experience horizontal mergers. Mergers are more likely if 1) market concentration is high; 2) the inverse demand curve is steep at high levels of output and...

This paper compares the extent of common ownership in the US and the EU stock markets, with a particular focus on differences in the applicable ownership transparency requirements. Most empirical research on common ownership to date has focused on US issuers, largely relying on ownership data...

Recent studies argue that institutional common ownership in rival firms may reduce competition in product markets. Yet, empirical evidences are mixed. I re-examine this hypothesis, documenting that competition for flows on the ground of relative performance reduces institutional investors'...

Has the antitrust arsenal run out of novel theories or weapons? Think again. Recent scholarship has come to challenge conventional wisdom with the latest target of antitrust imagination being institutional investors, including diversified index funds. New economic research suggests that common...

The share of stocks beneficially owned by institutional investors has increased substantially over the last three decades. Together with a high and increasing level of concentration in the asset management industry, this trend implies that a small number of institutional investors now constitute...

We document substantial time-series and cross-sectional variation in branch-level deposit account interest rates, maintenance fees, and fee thresholds, and examine whether variation in bank concentration helps explain variation in these prices. HHI alone is not correlated with any of the outcome...

Some scholars have argued that common ownership, which refers to an investor's simultaneous ownership of small stockholdings in several competing companies, is anticompetitive and prohibited by the U.S. antitrust laws. Proponents of this view target in particular large investment managers that...

Overlapping institutional ownership in the same industry can have anti-competitive effects but can also elevate product market competition by promoting investments with industry spillovers. Using a text-based product market threat variable, we find that firms with higher common ownership face...

Many natural competitors are jointly held by a small set of large institutional investors. In the US airline industry, taking common ownership into account implies increases in market concentration that are 10 times larger than what is “presumed likely to enhance market power” by antitrust...