Investors increasingly hold stock in multiple firms that compete in the same product market (“common ownership”), and this ownership structure is positively associated with voluntary disclosure. We posit that common owners want managers to take coordinated anti-competitive actions (i.e.,...

We examine the influence of common ownership on commonalities in the information environment. Specifically, we study commonalities in financial statements and in the actions of key agents such as financial analysts and firm managers who contribute and respond to the information environment....

In this paper, we study the effects of common ownership, the extent to which firms are linked via common owners, on employee earnings in U.S. local labor markets. Between 1999 and 2017, common ownership in local labor markets has more than doubled. Panel regressions show that employee earnings...

In this paper, we study common ownership in U.S. labor markets, and document that common ownership more than doubled over the period 1999–2017. To identify the causal effects of common ownership on labor market outcomes, we use a firm’s addition to the S&P 500 index as a shock to the common...

This paper investigates the monitoring effect of institutional investors on portfolio firms' audit quality. We identify an exogenous discontinuity in institutional ownership around the Russell index threshold to overcome the endogeniety concerns. We find that an exogenous increase in a firm's...

We find that quasi-indexer ownership is negatively associated with the ratio of non-audit service fees to total fees paid to the audit firm performing the audit service and with the likelihood of paying the audit firm more non-audit service fees than audit service fees. Using the annual Russell...

In the presence of business groups, the expropriation through related party transactions (RPTs) is common and costly to minority shareholders. Using the setting of India's RPT voting rule, I find that a majority-of-minority shareholder voting mechanism helps mitigate expropriation. Minority...

This paper investigates the association of philanthropic giving with market-based performance and institutional ownership using data from banks in Bangladesh from 2007– 2013. Our findings suggest that banks with a higher level of philanthropic giving achieve better performance, with a positive...

We investigate the influence of foreign institutional investors on firms' auditor choices in an international setting. Foreign institutional investors are likely to demand high-quality audits to mitigate the information asymmetry they face and facilitate their external monitoring when they...

Dozens of judicial opinions have held that shareholders own corporations, that directors are agents of shareholders, and even that directors are trustees of shareholders' property. Yet, until now, it has never been proven. These doctrines rest on unsubstantiated assumptions. In this book the...