Common Ownership

Gauging Common Ownership in Fintech Markets

A new empirical paper estimates the scope and impact of common ownership in fintech markets. The authors find limited common ownership among...

Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving

A new paper examines the relationship between the rising concentration in institutional investors' ownership of publicly traded U.S. firms and portfolio companies'...

The Passive Mechanisms of Common Ownership

A new paper explores the conundrum that common ownership poses for antitrust enforcers and competition and corporate scholars and sheds light on...

The Economic Costs of Common Ownership

A new empirical study attempts to estimate the economy-wide welfare costs of common ownership. The authors find that they are large and...

Is There Really a Conflict Between Better Corporate Governance and More Competitive Product Markets?

A new study shows that the supposed tradeoff between better corporate governance and more competitive product markets may not exist. More commonly-owned...

“Doubt is Their Product”: The Difference Between Research and Academic Lobbying

Tommaso Valletti, the former Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission, reflects on the intersection of academic economics and policymaking and offers...

Horizontal Shareholding’s Anticompetitive Effects and the Mechanisms That Produce It

Waiting for further proof of causal mechanisms before addressing the anticompetitive harm caused by horizontal shareholding is unjustified, just as it was when people...

Making Your Vote Count: Does the Voting Behavior of Asset Managers Truly Reflect Their Clients’ Interests?

In the past five years, thanks to growing public pressure, there has been increased attention on the voting behavior of asset managers. As a...

The Greatest Anticompetitive Threat of Our Time: Fixing the Horizontal Shareholding Problem

Undisputed empirical studies confirm that horizontal shareholding poses a great anticompetitive threat. What can antitrust enforcers do about it? Quite a lot, in fact.     Editors'...

Firms with Owners in Common Are Freer about Publicly Disclosing Information

The accounting literature has long examined how public disclosures relate to firm competitiveness. If common ownership is in fact hurting competition, companies with owners...

LATEST NEWS

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.