Insight

A simple index of common ownership is not so simple

May 15, 2019
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The FTC held a hearing in December 2018 about whether common ownership1 reduces competition among firms, featuring speakers such as FTC Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips and SEC Commissioner Robert J. Jackson. The hearing concluded with acknowledgments of the interesting and provocative nature of the early work in this field and calls for additional research.

In this article, we take a step back from the debate about whether and how common ownership may result in competitive harm and focus on a commonly used index for measuring common ownership concentration to ask what it is measuring.

This article was originally published in the ABA Section of Antitrust Law’s Spring 2019 publication The Exchange: Insurance and Financial Services Developments.

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