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...

Pichhadze (2010) introduced the Market Oriented Blockholder Model (MOBM) as properly describing the ownership pattern in the American equity markets. Under the model, the emerging blockholder in the American equity markets is the institutional investor (II). This poses a challenge to the...

I examine whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is a learning organization (i.e., one that is capable of learning and adaptation to the dynamic nature of the securities markets – the subject of the SEC's regulatory oversight). Using the treatment of public corporate...

Ease of coordination can enable diffuse shareholders to play a more effective role in corporate governance and thereby increase firm value. Using geographical proximity and correlation in portfolio allocation decisions as proxies for the ease of coordination, I find evidence that ease of...

We document that in M&As a significant proportion of targets' equity is owned by financial institutions that simultaneously own targets' bonds (“dual holders”). Targets with larger equity ownership by dual holders have lower M&A equity premia and larger abnormal bond returns, particularly...

Do institutional investors engage with companies on corporate externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions? And if so, why? We study voting at shareholder meetings by two emblematic global investors: BlackRock, a major asset manager, and the Norway Fund, a responsible sovereign wealth fund....

In this paper, we investigate the impact of ownership structure on corporate advertising expenditures. Using mutual fund mergers as an exogenous shock to ownership structure, we find that competing firms owned by the same institutional blockholders experience a significant reduction in...

Managerial resistance precludes half of shareholder-initiated proposals from reaching the ballot stage. I construct a novel dataset of excluded and withdrawn proposals from the Securities and Exchange Commission's responses to managers' exclusion requests. An examination of announcement returns...

Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders are more likely to...