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...

Failures of banks' governance and risk management functions have been identified as key causes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This article reviews the empirical literature that investigates the relationship between governance structures and risk management functions as well as their impact...

This paper looks at the post-financial-crisis period, and the relationship between default risk and corporate governance for financial firms outside North America. Default risk is measured by both credit default swap spreads (CDS) and the Merton-type default probabilities from Bloomberg. Our...

We investigate whether corporate governance is related to insolvency risk of financial institutions. Using a large sample of U.S. financial institutions over the 2005–2010 period, we find that corporate governance is positively related with insolvency risk of financial institutions as proxied...

This paper analyzes the relation between institutional investment duration and corporate governance using a new metric of investment duration that accounts for firm-specific investment durations of each institution. We conjecture that institutional investors that hold a firm's shares for a...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality 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...

This paper analyzes the role of passive blockholders in corporate governance using data on Schedule 13G filings. We show that firm value increases with the number and aggregate ownership of passive blockholders after controlling for other possible determinants of firm value. More importantly, we...

Although empirical studies show that common shareholding affects corporate conduct and that common horizontal shareholding lessens competition, critics have argued that the law should not take any action until we have clearer proof on the causal mechanisms. I show that we actually have ample...

Scholars and antitrust enforcers have raised concerns about anticompetitive effects that may arise when institutional investors hold substantial stakes in competing firms. Their concern rests on empirical evidence that such common concentrated ownership is associated with higher prices and lower...