Dr. S. Abraham Ravid, professor of finance and chair of the finance department at Sy Syms School of Business, has co-authored an article accepted by the Journal of Corporate Finance, a top-refereed journal in the field, titled “Large Investors’ Portfolios and Firm Value.” “The question my co-author, Dr. Naciye Sekerci of the Utrecht University School of Economics, and I address is whether blockholders (investors who hold significant chunks of equity in the firm) are good or bad for firm value. We used a unique Swedish data set which provides the portfolio of all investors, individuals, firms and institutions, so we can see how important is the stake in a specific firm to the investors.” They found, somewhat counterintuitively, that bigger stakes by large blockholders increase firm value, regardless of who these shareholders are (individuals, firms, families, institutions corporations or even the government). Furthermore, these large stakes can counteract control-enhancing mechanisms which are generally considered bad for the firm.