“Calm Down about Common Ownership” is the title of an article Thom Lambert and I published in the latest (Fall 2018) issue of Regulation. The article is a condensed version of our full paper, “The Case for Doing Nothing About Common Ownership of Small Stakes in Competing Firms,” which I posted about in May.
While I’ve not been posting here much in the past few months, Thom and I have written a series of blog posts at Truth On The Market about the perceived problem of common ownership (specifically by institutional investors) across competing firms, and the problems both with the alleged antitrust harms and the proposed “fixes”. Those posts both summarize and expand upon some of the arguments and issues in our paper. To make it easier to find them, I’ve listed them below in chronological–and logical–order:
- 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
This issue of common ownership and whether antitrust authorities should deal with it is currently a fairly hot topic. In fact, today the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is opening up its Hearings on Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century. which include the topic of common ownership. Thom and I submitted comments in advance of the hearing based on our paper. Next week I’ll attend a debate forum on the issue with other scholars (including some aggressive pro-enforcement folks we take to task in our paper), regulators, and members of the investment community. It should be an interesting time.
Isn’t there a Chinese curse about that?