Who Owns Appalachia? Landownership and Its Impact

Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region\u27s land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region\u27s people. Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55,000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights. The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region—local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging. Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation. The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force-- a cooperative effort among communities, scholars, and individuals in the region and funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission--performed the survey.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/1007/thumbnail.jp

On the Use and Misuse of Stock Price

In 2013, in an effort to better understand the purpose, use, and potential misuse of stock prices in public equity markets, the Millstein Center and the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRCi) issued a call for papers on the role prices play as a corporate governance mechanism. In lieu of completed projects, proposals were sought for new research that explored how equity prices affect the decision-making processes of corporate management, boards of directors, and investors. On September 19, 2014, the Millstein Center and the IRRCi hosted a gathering entitled the Conference on the Use and Misuse of Stock Price, during which several authors presented papers examining the topic from various angles. The following summaries highlight key takeaways from the panel discussions

Annual Report 2019-2020

Looking back on the 2019-2020 academic year, we are pleased to reflect on another highly productive period for the Millstein Center

Inversions: Implications for Tax Planning, Tax Policy, and Corporate Governance

On February 27, 2015, the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, the Richard Paul Richman Center, the Charles Evans Gerber Transactional Studies Center, and David Polk & Wardwell hosted a conference on Inversions: Implications for Tax Planning, Tax Policy, and Corporate Governance. The following is a summary of the panel discussions

Changes in Ownership: Beyond the Berle-Means Paradigm

The “Changes in Ownership: Beyond the Berle-Means Paradigm” Symposium, held April 2013, explored whether, and how, the recent explosion of new ownership models alters the paradigm of dispersed ownership developed by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means three generations ago. That model indicated that public corporations were owned by dispersed shareholders whose separate ownership positions were too small to justify extensive monitoring of managerial performance. This view of the distribution of ownership in U.S. corporations has been foundational for both much academic work and for much of corporate law and governance, which have been aimed at addressing the monitoring shortfall. The Symposium explored three specific developments in corporate ownership that may indicate a sea change in the landscape painted by Berle and Means. The first development was a resurgence of companies going public with dual-class stock, similar to the Swedish capital structure, especially in the technology sector. The second development was the growth in private equity exits through a secondary buyout rather than an IPO or strategic sale. The third and final development explored at the Symposium was the re-concentration of public equity holdings, as a result of investment intermediation, that has put the potential for control into the collective hands of a much smaller, more concentrated group of holders. This briefing will summarize the day’s discussions on whether these various developments represent an explosion in ownership forms that represent a real diversification and complication of the pattern of ownership of U.S. corporations — a new pattern that truly reaches “Beyond the Berle- Means Paradigm”

The Future of Finance Colloquium

On April 25, 2014, the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership and the CFA Institute hosted the Future of Finance Colloquium. The following is a summary of the panel discussions

Private Ownership at a Public Crossroads: Studying the Rapidly Evolving World of Corporate Ownership

Capital formation in the United States is currently in the midst of a significant transition with largely unexplored consequences for the ownership and control of American business, as well as significant implications for the future of the public equity markets. Although public equity markets remain vast and important, they are no longer the primary source of capital for business formation and growth. Increasingly, capital for business formation and growth is being raised — and held — privately from a relatively new set of institutional investors (most importantly, venture capital and private equity funds). As a result, ownership and control over significant swaths of American business has shifted from participants in public markets to participants in the private markets

Discussion on Transparent and Effective Disclosure

On January 22, 2015, the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership and the Center for Audit Quality hosted a Discussion on Transparent and Effective Disclosure. The following is a summary of the panel discussions

Key Topics in Corporate Governance: Disclosure

On June 18, 2015, the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership hosted a symposium on transparency in the corporate and investment communities. The half-day event brought together prominent speakers from the business, regulatory and academic sectors to discuss current trends and emerging issues associated with disclosure. In a related vein, panelists also debated the case for furthering engagement with retail investors whose needs and resources may differ, at times substantially, from their institutional counterparts. The following is a summary of the panel discussions