The rise of passive investing is leading to a new reality of horizontal ownership in combination with a reconcentration of corporate control, notably at the Big Three passive asset managers BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. We introduce the concept of mandate ownership and point to a process...

The present study investigates how increasing bank accounts and bank concentration affect mobile money innovations in 148 countries. It builds on scholarly and policy concerns in the literature that increasing bank accounts may not be having the desired effects on financial inclusion on the one...

Measuring media concentration has always been a difficult task and results were never satisfactory. The convergence of media, telecommunications and information technologies adds a new dimension to this problem as it results in changing market structures, exacerbating among other things the...

The U.S brewing industry plays an important role in the U.S. economy. There is an on-going debate over the impact of rise in concentration in the brewing industry as well as its competitiveness, e.g., Denney et al. (2002), Tremblay and Tremblay (2005). Such on-going concerns and debate over the...

Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate -- take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain...

Input transactions in the petrochemical industry are often subject to temporal specificity. That is, non-performance in quantity, such as delaying delivery, is highly costly to producers and can be an effective holdup strategy. In the 1970s, two oil price shocks induced high price volatility in...

In our society, information has assumed a fundamental role in every decisional and social process. Governments and big private companies collect huge amounts of data that represent a strategic and economically relevant asset. The predictive relevance of big data management and the global...