NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Large Blocks of Stock: Prevalence, Size, and Measurement

Jennifer Dlugosz, Rudiger Fahlenbrach, Paul Gompers, Andrew Metrick

NBER Working Paper No. 10671*
Issued in August 2004
NBER Program(s):   CF    AP

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 bias 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. We also demonstrate that our fixes are economically and statistically significant in an analysis of the relationship between firm value and outside blockholders.

*Published: Dlugosz, Jennifer & Fahlenbrach, Rudiger & Gompers, Paul & Metrick, Andrew, 2006. "Large blocks of stock: Prevalence, size, and measurement," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 594-618, June.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

Information about Free Papers

You should expect a free download if you are a subscriber, a corporate associate of the NBER, a journalist, a site with your domain name in ".GOV", or a resident of nearly any developing country or transition economy.

If you usually get free papers at work/university but do not at home, you can either connect to your work VPN or proxy (if any) or elect to have a link to the paper emailed to your work email address below. The email address must be connected to a subscribing college, university, or other subscribing institution. Gmail and other free email addresses will not have access.

E-mail:

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

 
Publications
Activities
Meetings
Data
People
About

National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org