Common Ownership Problems

In recent years, there has been a lot of discussion over the problem of “common ownership,” namely, the fact that the giant institutional investors who dominate today’s markets tend to own stock in everything, and this may be a good thing but can also be bad if it encourages collusive behavior among competing firms linked by the same set of shareholders.

What has received less attention is the effect of common ownership on shareholder voting and corporate transactions.  When a handful of large shareholders own stock in two merging partners – say, Tesla and SolarCity (not a hypothetical, incidentally) – they may vote for less-than-optimal deals on one side in order to benefit their holdings on the other side. 

There are two implications to this:  First, these cross-holdings may incentivize corporate managers to pursue nonwealth maximizing transactions when cross-holders are a significant part of the shareholder base (and may call into question the disinterestedness of large shareholders for Corwin cleansing purposes).  And second, very often, these institutional shareholders are actually mutual funds, with cross-holdings not in a single fund, but in multiple funds across a fund family.  Yet their voting patterns (or the actions of their portfolio firms) suggest that their influence is geared towards maximizing wealth across the family as though the investments were all part of a single portfolio, which is a potential violation of their duties to each individual fund.

I’ve written about both of these issues: the former in Shareholder Divorce Court (where I describe the Tesla situation) and the latter in Family Loyalty: Mutual Fund Voting and Fiduciary Obligation, but at the time, I only had a limited set of empirical studies to draw upon.

All of which is a long way of saying that two new studies were recently posted to SSRN, and they reach conclusions similar to those of the earlier studies. 

First, there’s Dual-Ownership and Risk-Taking Incentives in Managerial Compensation, by Tao Chen, Li Zhang, and Qifei Zhu.  They find that institutional investors who own stock and bonds in the same firm are more likely to favor managerial compensation policies that minimize incentives for risk-taking, as compared to institutional investors who own stock alone.  Significantly, they find this effect at the mutual fund family level, suggesting that mutual funds are setting voting policy to maximize wealth at their funds collectively, without differentiating policies that might benefit some funds more than others.

Second, there’s Common Ownership and Competition in Mergers and Acquisitions, by Mohammad (Vahid) Irani, Wenhao Yang, and Feng Zhang.  Similar to those who find that firms with common owners compete less in their product markets, the authors find that firms with common owners compete less in the takeover market, so that common ownership across potential acquirers of a target firm reduces the likelihood that the target will receive a competing bid, and increases returns to acquirers upon announcement of a bid (though the cross-ownership does not seem to effect target bid premiums or target returns).  And, at least as I understand their methodology, these results are identified at the fund family level.

Anyhoo, this is a fascinating area and I very much hope we see more empirical work along these lines.