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Ownership and Governance

Shareholders have, in recent years, imposed considerable influence on firms and the managers that run them. Their role has become so prevalent that hedge funds, activist investors, and short sellers dominate the headlines of the popular business press. Academics are desperately trying to keep up with the furious pace of change and incorporate emerging phenomena into theories of corporate governance. To facilitate this process, this chapter reviews the key forms of corporate ownership and describes ways in which they affect firm-level outcomes. The chapter identifies five issues about which ownership scholars disagree: the competitive influence of common shareholding, the costs and benefits of excess control, the consequences of share repurchases, the threat of short sellers, and the value-creating prospects of shareholder-nominated directors. The chapter describes the state of each debate with the hope that strategy scholars, in the years ahead, will add nuance to what we know about these pressing matters.