Who holds the shares and votes in U.S. public firms

To analyse and understand the effects of shareholder and control structures in U.S. publicly traded corporations, we require accurate data on the holdings of active and passive institutional and individual investors, and corporate insiders, such as CEOs and board members. For the past decades we either collected this data individually for a limited subset of firms, or relied on very expensive and often incomplete sources of ownership data, such as Thomson Reuters 13-F data, Factset or CapitalIQ. This is insufficient if we want to properly assess the trends in corporate ownership structures and evaluate their effects on corporate outcomes, competition and market outcomes. For the benefit of the profession we are making a new and complete data set of control and shareholdings in all U.S publicly traded corporations freely available.

The holdings data is combined with company and security identifiers and share-specific voting rights for dual-class corporations, to facilitate combinations with other databases. For further details on the construction of the data set, refer to the Online Data Appendix of “Mavericks, Universal, and Common Owners - The Largest Shareholders of U.S. Public Firms”.