Institutional Investors

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...

Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart on Empowering Twitter’s Shareholders

In an interview with ProMarket, Nobel laureate Oliver Hart explains why broadening our perspective on fiduciary duty beyond maximizing shareholder wealth could...

Are Large Institutional Investors Actually Effective in Getting Companies to Reduce Their CO2 Emissions?

Large institutional investors have been accused of not doing enough to reduce CO2 emissions. However, a new study finds that firms like BlackRock, Vanguard,...

Barking Up the Right Tree: How Shareholder Activists Raise Issues to Placate Large Mutual Funds

A new paper examines whether shareholder activists tailor their campaigns to persuade large institutional investors and finds that in proxy communications, activists...

It is Not Just Small Investors Who Will Be Silenced Thanks to SEC’s New Rules

Shareholder proposals are one of the most effective forms of shareholder voice in corporate America. It is one of the main channels...

Towards the Giant Three: The Rise and Rise of the Big Three Index Funds

The Big Three index fund managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors—hold a significant proportion of the stock of US public companies, and they...

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...

LATEST NEWS

A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.