Mavericks, Universal, and Common Owners - The Largest Shareholders of U.S. Public Firms

Amir Amel-Zadeh, Fiona Kasperk and Martin C. Schmalz

No 9926, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America’s largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of “universal” and “common” ownership of firms are therefore lower than previously believed based on analyses of institutional investors’ holdings alone, and the heterogeneity in ownership structures across firms is greater. Consolidation in the asset management industry increases universal ownership and common ownership of industry rivals. Extant results claiming indexing alone explains the rise of universal ownership cannot be confirmed with the new, more comprehensive data.

Keywords: common ownership; institutional ownership; blockholders; insiders; antitrust; governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G23 G34 L21 L40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9926.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9926

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().