The Competitive Effects of Common Ownership: Theory, Applications, and Mis-Applications

By Daniel P. O’Brien – 

An intense policy debate rages over the competitive effects of common ownership. But the empirical work that sparked the debate is not well tethered to economic theory, and this has led to misconceptions about what the empirical work shows. The purpose of this paper is to take a step back and assess what existing economic theory says and does not say about the competitive effects of common ownership and evaluate the empirical work and policy debate in that li