Paper Abstract
888. John C. Coates IV, Ronald A. Fein, Kevin Crenny & L. Vivian Dong, Quantifying Foreign Institutional Block Ownership at Publicly Traded U.S. Corporations, 10/2016.
Abstract: This short technical report provides an empirical analysis of the level of foreign institutional block ownership at a broad set of publicly traded corporations. Disclosed institutional blockholders of every company in the Standard & Poor's 500 index are analyzed to determine if these blockholders were foreign entities or were majority owned or controlled by foreign entities. Roughly one in eleven (9%) companies in the S&P 500 has one or more foreign institutions each owning five percent or more blocks of stock, nine have foreign institutions with ten percent or more blocks, five have a foreign institution with more than fifteen percent, and three have foreign institutions with more than 20% blocks. Three firms have multiple foreign institutional blockholders. The descriptive data reported here may assist lawmakers, analysts, and investors in assessing the effects of globalization of capital markets and the interaction of country and governance risk, and in developing policies. Among other things, these data may inform debates on the degree to which domestic political spending by U.S. corporations conveys any potential for foreign influence through governance, and the likely costs and benefits of disclosure laws regarding such influence.