Calm Down about Common Ownership

“Calm Down about Common Ownership” is the title of a piece Thom Lambert and I published in the Fall 2018 issue of Regulation, which just hit online. The article is a condensed version our recent paper, “The Case for Doing Nothing About Institutional Investors’ Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms.” In short, we argue that concern about common ownership lacks a theoretically sound foundation and is built upon faulty empirical support. We also explain why proposed “fixes” would do more harm than good.

Over the past several weeks we wrote a series of blog posts here that summarize or expand upon different parts of our argument. To pull them all into one place:

• The Case for Doing Nothing About Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms
• The Case for Doing Nothing: The ‘Problem’ of Common Ownership
• Problems With the Theory of Anticompetitive Harm from Common Ownership
• Problems with the Evidence of Anticompetitive Harm from Common Ownership
• Problems with Proposed Solutions to the Common Ownership Problem
• Lowering the Barriers to Entry to the Common Ownership Debate: A (Relatively) Non-Technical Explanation of MHHI Delta
• What To Make of MHHI? A policy problem