This paper proposes a model of corporate control and oligopolistic competition under common ownership. Each firm’s conduct results from Nash bargaining (NB) among shareholders and firms play a Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains. NB encompasses a rich class of models of corporate control under...

I study the simultaneous ownership of equity of competing companies by the same investor, i.e., common ownership, in 39,867 publicly listed corporations in 125 countries between 2000-2020. I construct a global data set to document the prevalence of common ownership in multiple forms, including...

In recent years, debates over the social purpose of corporations have taken center stage amidst rising concern about externalities (such as those associated with climate change and harmful speech) generated by firms. A key motivation is the claim that government regulation and liability regimes...

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 provides a theoretical model for explaining the separation of ownership and control in firms. An entrepreneur hires a worker for providing eff ort to complete a project. The worker's eff ort determines the probability that the project is completed on time, but the worker receives...

Increasing concern over corporate governance has led to calls for more shareholder in uence over corporate decisions, but allowing shareholders to vote on more issues, such as executive compensation, may not affect the quality of governance. We should expect instead that, under current rules,...

Over the past twenty years, a growing number of empirical studies have provided evidence that governance arrangements protecting incumbents from removal promote managerial entrenchment, reducing firm value. As a result of these studies, “good” corporate governance is widely understood today...

The Modern Corporation and Private Property highlighted the evolving separation of ownership and control in the public corporation and the effects of that separation on the allocation of power within the corporation. This essay explores the implications of intermediation for those themes. The...

We show that corporate governance practices vary predictably across different types of blockholders. Nonfinancial blockholders are six times as likely to self-identify as active shareholders relative to financial blockholders. Textual analysis of regulatory filings reveals that nonfinancial...