This article answers, in the affirmative, two core research questions: do we need long-term shareholders and can we find them? The economy needs long-term shareholders to provide prudent and profitable patient capital, generate an antidote to corporate short-termism and spearhead managerial...

There is ongoing academic interest in understanding share ownership and control dynamics in publicly listed companies, given the corporate governance and regulatory implications arising therefrom. This article presents a new dataset and analysis of shareholder information, focusing on the...

The nineteenth century saw the standardization and rapid spread of the modern business corporation around the world. Yet those early corporations differed from their contemporary counterparts in important ways. Most obviously, they commonly deviated from the one-share-one-vote rule that is...

Important capital market, regulatory and technological developments have created greater investor appetite and capacity for engagement with public companies. This development is highlighted by investors’ current efforts to engage with companies in various markets on material environmental,...

Over recent years, a number of regulators have launched proposals to expand the obligation to disclose major share ownership in listed companies. This paper shows that these are not stand-alone developments. Using a unique dataset comprising data from 25 countries over 11 years (1995-2005) and...

We focus on firms that chronically underperform and evaluate ways that institutional investors can facilitate the redeployment of assets to higher valued uses. Our evidence indicates that institutional holdings affect firm survival. Increases in institutional holdings are associated with...

Controlling shareholders often pledge their ownership in the firm to offer collateral for either their personal loans or loans to the firm. Pledging of shares modifies their payoff structure, without altering their control rights. This modification in the payoff structure can influence the...

In this paper, we ask how firms’ optimal debt structure responds to a change in the bankruptcy regime. While existing work shows that this relationship is dependent on the ex-ante liquidation value of a firm, we demonstrate that the ownership of lenders they are connected to also matters. We...

“Common Ownership” is a phenomenon where shareholders hold substantial stakes in firms that impose externalities on each other. The “Common Ownership” hypothesis suggests that these shareholders may internalize some of these externalities amongst their portfolio firms. While most of the...

We use the history of private limited liability companies (PLLCs) to challenge two pervasive assumptions in the literature: (1) Anglo-American legal institutions were better for economic development than continental Europe's civil-law institutions; and (2) the corporation was the superior form...