Minority shareholdings have been on the regulatory agenda of competition authorities for some time. Recent empirical studies, however, draw attention to a new, thought provoking theory of harm: common ownership by institutional investors holding small, parallel equity positions in several...

Horizontal shareholdings exist when a common set of investors own significant shares in corporations that are horizontal competitors in a product market. Economic models show that substantial horizontal shareholdings are likely to anticompetitively raise prices when the owned businesses compete...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the Italian legislation on interlocking directorates and its enforcement in the last decade. Italy is the only EU Member State to have introduced a specific anti-interlocking provision aimed at promoting competition in the banking, insurance, and...

We present a simple model of common ownership in which an investor chooses its stake in competing firms in light of the effects on firm behavior and firm profits. Two firms compete in Cournot duopoly, and ownership affects a firm’s objective function in the manner posited by Bresnahan & Salop...

A growing number of policymakers and scholars are calling for tougher rules to curb corporate acquisitions. But these appeals are premature. There is currently little evidence to suggest that mergers systematically harm consumer welfare. More importantly, scholars fail to identify alternative...

Corporate governance law addresses the misaligned incentives between officers and directors of publicly-owned companies and their shareholders and how this can lead to the destruction of shareholder value. Antitrust law governs the interaction between corporations and other economic actors in...

These slides summarize the theoretical literature on horizontal common ownership concentration and its impact on competition, as presented at the FTC's hearings on common ownership and competition in December 2018. They are primarily based on this literature review:...

This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005 for four advanced countries, UK, France, Germany and the US. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis - whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

Abstract This study re–examines the theory of legal–origin on the basis of a new longitudinal dataset for four OECD countries (UK, USA, France and Germany) over a long time span 1970–2005. It observes that the civil law countries (France and Germany) provided better minority shareholder...