Large Blocks of Stock: Prevalence, Size, and Measurement

29 Pages Posted: 19 Jul 2004

See all articles by Jennifer Dlugosz

Jennifer Dlugosz

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; Swiss Finance Institute; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Paul A. Gompers

Harvard Business School - Finance Unit; Harvard University - Entrepreneurial Management Unit; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Andrew Metrick

Yale School of Management; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Yale University - Yale Program on Financial Stability

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Abstract

Large blocks of stock play an important role in many studies of corporate governance and finance. Despite this important role, there is no standardized data set for these blocks, and the best available data source, Compact Disclosure, has many mistakes and biases. In this paper, we document these mistakes and show how to fix them. The mistakes and biases tend to increase with the level of reported blockholdings: in firms where Compact Disclosure reports that aggregate blockholdings are greater than 50 percent, these aggregate holdings are incorrect more than half the time and average holdings for these incorrect firms are overstated by almost 30 percentage points. For researchers using uncorrected blockholder data as a dependent variable, these errors will increase the standard error of coefficient estimates but do not appear to cause bias. However, we find that if blockholders are used as an independent variable, economically significant errors-in-variables biases can occur. We demonstrate these biases using a representative analysis of the relationship between firm value and outside blockholders. An online appendix to our paper provides a "clean" data set for our sample firms and time period. For researchers who need to work outside of this sample, we also test the efficacy of alternative (cheaper) fixes to this data problem, and find that truncating or winsorizing the sample can reduce about half of the bias in our representative application. The data used in this project is available free of charge from the authors (metrick@wharton.upenn.edu).

Keywords: Corporate governance, large shareholders, ownership

JEL Classification: G3

Suggested Citation

Dlugosz, Jennifer and Fahlenbrach, Rüdiger and Gompers, Paul A. and Metrick, Andrew, Large Blocks of Stock: Prevalence, Size, and Measurement. Journal of Corporate Finance, pp. 594-618, June 2006, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=565504 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.565504

Jennifer Dlugosz

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System ( email )

20th Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20551
United States

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne ( email )

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Switzerland
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HOME PAGE: http://https://www.epfl.ch/labs/sfi-rf/

Swiss Finance Institute

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European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
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Belgium

Paul A. Gompers

Harvard Business School - Finance Unit ( email )

Boston, MA 02163
United States
617-495-6297 (Phone)
617-496-8443 (Fax)

Harvard University - Entrepreneurial Management Unit ( email )

Cambridge, MA 02163
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

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European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

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Belgium

HOME PAGE: http://www.ecgi.org

Andrew Metrick (Contact Author)

Yale School of Management ( email )

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(203)-432-3069 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://faculty.som.yale.edu/andrewmetrick/

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ( email )

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Yale University - Yale Program on Financial Stability

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