Common Ownership in America: 1980-2017

Abstract

Schmalz, and Glen Weyl. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w25454.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Who’s Paying Attention? Measuring Common Ownership and Its Impact on Managerial Incentives

“…In this section, we provide summary statistics on managerial incentives to internalize externalities, as measured using the different versions of GGL, and the extent to which managers' motives have shifted over the last 30+ years. These summary statistics highlight the importance of accounting for investor attention 9 Blackrock reports its holdings under seven different entities, and the Thomson data aggregates these to six different manager numbers. We follow Ben-David et al (2018) and aggregate these holdings since Blackrock exercises its influence and votes these shares at the parent level.…”

Common Ownership and Corporate Social Responsibility

“…We end the sample at 2012 because there are known issues with the data since 2013. In each year, we use the last quarter data for each firm to construct the measure (Gilje et al, 2019 In this paper, we follow Backus et al (2019) and use the average weight that a firm puts on its industry rivals' profits as the main measure of common ownership. The main advantage of this measure is that it is directly linked to the common ownership theory and empirically measures the parameter λ in equation 1of our model.…”

“…Common ownership in the U.S. economy increases dramatically in the past three decades (Backus, Conlon and Sinkinson, 2019). This secular trend has attracted attentions from both academia and policy makers.…”

“…We follow Lins, Servaes and Tamayo (2017) and construct a time-series consistent measure for a firm's CSR policy. Our main measure of common ownership is the average weight that a firm puts on its industry rivals' profits (Backus, Conlon and Sinkinson, 2019). We use the 3-digit SIC code as the definition of an industry in our main specification.…”

Common Ownership and Product Market Competition: Evidence from the U.S. Airline Industry

“…Backus et al (2019) argue that the Thomson Reuters dataset has gaps in coverage and errors relative to the source documents, the SEC 13F filings. The discrepancy between the Thomson Reuters dataset and the scraped data ofBackus et al (2019) directly from the SEC 13F filings occurs in the period of 2010 and 2015. Since our analysis uses the data from the first quarter of 2009, it is relatively free from this data problem.…”