Fiona Kasperk

PhD in Financial Economics

Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Park End Street, OX1 1HP

fiona.kasperk.dphil@said.oxford.edu

Research Interests:

corporate finance, corporate governance, productivity

Selected work

Mavericks, Universal, and Common Owners -
The Largest Shareholders of U.S. Public Firms

joint with Amir Amel-Zadeh, Martin Schmalz

We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America’s largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of “universal” and “common” ownership of firms are therefore lower than previously believed based on analyses of institutional investors’ holdings alone, and the heterogeneity in ownership structures across firms is greater. Consolidation in the asset management industry increases universal ownership and common ownership of industry rivals. Extant results claiming indexing alone explains the rise of universal ownership cannot be confirmed with the new, more comprehensive data.

Common Ownership, Incentives, and Productivity

joint with Amir Amel-Zadeh, Martin Schmalz

We collect uniquely comprehensive ownership data for the universe of U.S. public firms to examine whether variation in ownership helps explain variation in productivity. We find that common ownership of product market rivals is negatively associated with total factor productivity. Using index additions of competitors as shocks to common ownership, we find evidence of an indirect causal effect on productivity: common ownership affects productivity through a reduction in performance-sensitive managerial compensation, which in turn causes lower productivity.

Activist Portfolios

available upon request

This paper provides the first comprehensive study of activist portfolios and their implications for activist campaigns. Contrary to common perception activists are highly diversified, not only across targeted firms, but also across competing firms which are never formally targeted. I show that the abnormal returns to a campaign generated by the activist portfolio of target and competing firms significantly outperform returns to the target firm only. Further analysis documents concurrent performance improvements at activist owned competitors, while target firms disappoint relative to matched controls. Overall these findings suggest that the effects of activist investors may be more extensive than previously established and arise as portfolio spillovers are internalized.