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...

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...

Competition requires that firms have incentives to compete. Common ownership reduces these incentives. There is no known reason or mechanism by which firms are supposed to compete in the absence of incentives to do so. All arguments in the defense of the asset management industry amount to a...

Dennis, Gerardi, and Schenone (2017) (DGS) claim to replicate the data construction and results of Azar, Schmalz, and Tecu (forthcoming) (AST). While their implementation of the main specifications in AST generates qualitatively similar results, they claim that AST's baseline results are driven...

The question of whether and how partial common-ownership links between strategically interacting firms affect firm objectives and behavior has been the subject of theoretical inquiry for decades. Since then, the growth of intermediated asset management and consolidation in the asset-management...

We construct and analyze a new data set on U.S. corporate ownership to study how the inclusion of blockholders' and corporate insiders' holdings affects the measurement of common ownership among America's largest publicly traded firms. Including blockholders’ and insiders’ holdings reveals...

In this letter we address the terms of reference of the Australian Parliament's Standing Committee on Economics and also make some additional comments. Our key points are as follows: The default model is not that firms will compete. Only if firms have the right incentives they will compete, and...

We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America's largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of "universal" and...