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...

We derive a measure that captures the extent to which common ownership shifts managers' incentives to internalize externalities. A key feature of the measure is that it allows for the possibility that not all investors are attentive to whether a manager's actions benefit the investor's overall...

Conventional wisdom is that diversification weakens governance by spreading an investor too thinly. We show that, when an investor owns multiple firms ("common ownership"), governance through both voice and exit can strengthen -- even if the firms are in unrelated industries. Under common...

This paper develops a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium. It explains how and why a voting premium emerges in the absence of takeovers and controlling shareholders. The model features a minority blockholder and dispersed shareholders who trade shares in a competitive...

We explore how financial market trading shapes the ownership structure of industry rivals. In equilibrium, only a fraction of identical investors acquires positions in all firms (common owners). Investors’ ability to influence competition generates: (i) either strategic complementarity or...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of blockholders (large shareholders) in corporate governance. We start with the underlying property rights of public corporations; we discuss how blockholders are critical in addressing free-rider problems and why, like...

The Indian Tata Group is one of the largest and most admired business groups in the world. It has 28 listed subsidiaries and more than 80 operating businesses. It has shown strong financial performance and social responsibility for decades. Interestingly, it has a unique ownership structure: the...

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,...

Little is known about the relationship between family firms and their employees. This paper aims to close this gap. We distinguish between family management and family ownership as two dimensions of family firms and analyze their respective influence on downsizing. Our findings show that family...

Using average performance measures – as the literature does - to investigate the relation between ownership structure and performance suffers from severe drawbacks. We propose a marginal Tobin's q and argue for its superiority