We use a natural experiment to identify a causal effect of the threat of shareholder litigation on ownership structure, governance, and firm performance. We find that when it becomes harder for small shareholders to litigate, ownership becomes more concentrated and shifts from individuals to...

We hypothesize that a source of commonality in a stock's liquidity arises from correlated liquidity demand of the stock's investors. Focusing on correlated trading of mutual funds, we find that stocks with high mutual fund ownership have comovements in liquidity about twice as large as those for...

We investigate the relation between common institutional ownership of the firms in an industry and product market competition. We find that common ownership is neither robustly positively related with industry profitability or output prices nor robustly negatively related with measures of...

We show firms pay more dividends and repurchase more shares when they have higher levels of institutional ownership, even if the institutions are not activist investors. We also find evidence of an effect of institutional ownership on proxy voting, profitability, R&D, and CEO compensation. Our...

We identify the power of institutional blockholders to influence management using previous occurrences of forced CEO turnover at other firms in the blockholders' overall portfolio. We create a “powerful blockholder linkage” measure that strongly predicts future forced CEO turnover. These...