A fast-growing legal literature commenting on a set of empirical papers alleging anticompetitive effects of common ownership claims that the reported effects, if true, would imply that corporate executives violate their fiduciary duty: whereas acting in the interest of common owners can help...

We examine whether institutions' monitoring effectiveness is related to the number of their blockholdings. We find that the number of blocks that a firm's large institutions hold is positively associated with forced chief executive officer (CEO) turnover-performance sensitivity, abnormal returns...

The paper shows that, as owners accumulate larger stakes and hence become less risk-tolerant, their incentives to monitor management are attenuated because monitoring shifts some of the firm's risk from management to owners. This counterbalances the positive effect which more concentrated...

The corporate governance literature has shown that self-interested controlling owners tend to divert corporate resources for private benefits at the expense of other shareholders. Such behavior leads the controlling owners to prefer long maturity debt to short maturity debt, to avoid frequent...

A dual-class ownership structure, accompanied by disproportional control rights, is traditionally considered to be an inferior form of governance. We examine how the capital structure choices made by dual-class firms (i.e., by their controlling shareholders or insiders), as well as the...

We find that ownership changes much less over time in private firms than in public firms. The average largest shareholder in private (public) Norwegian firms keeps the same stake in 82% (14%) of two consecutive years. In private firms past ownership dominates ownership determinants proposed in...

This paper examines the dynamics trade-off financial structure in presence of ownership dispersion of newly created firms. Our objective is to test empirically the relevance of trade-off theory regards the debt funding behavior of business start-up. We use a sample of 200 business start-ups and...