Survey_KK_2001

Abstract

This paper utilizes a unique database consisting of all electronically registered shareholdings of Finnish stocks by more than one million individuals and institutions. These shareholdings cover more than 99.99% of the total market capitalization of Finnish stocks. Using these data, the paper documents patterns in shareownership in Finland at June 1, 2000 and prior changes since 1995. The focus is on the following issues: (1) the breakdown of the number of investors and the proportion of aggregate investment wealth by institutional category, (2) the distribution of individuals’ investment wealth by gender, age, mother tongue, municipality, province, and country of residence, (3) the distribution of IPO investors’ gender and age, (4) the extent to which investors hold shares of companies headquartered in the investor’s home municipality or province, (5) the concentration of individuals’ investment wealth, (6) the number and socioeconomic attributes of individuals with at least one million FIM of investment wealth and how their number depends on the overall level of stock prices, (7) portfolio diversification, and (8) the relationship between a stock’s ownership structure and exchange listing, industry, and market capitalization. Moreover, we report changes in ownership by investor category and changes in individuals’ ownership concentration, diversification, and the distribution of ownership by province. Our data include the initial balance in FCSD’s shareownership records at January 1, 1995 and all changes in these records until May 31, 2000 for all publicly quoted companies represented in the paperless system of share ownership and trading, called the Book Entry System. At the end of the sample period, all but 2 domestic listed companies (Kylpyläkasino and SKOP) with more than 99.99% of stock market capitalization were represented in the Book Entry System, at the beginning of our sample period about 97% of the Finnish stock market capitalization was included in the register.1 In all, there are about 25 million initial balance records and changes of ownership in our data. Since all changes in the records are stamped on the day of transaction, these data allow us determine the ownership for each stockholder at any point of time between the above two dates. In this paper we analyze registered stockholder ownership records at seven separate dates: on January 1 from 1995 through 2000 and on June 1, 2000. The Book Entry System entails compulsory registration of holdings for Finnish individuals and institutions. Foreigners are partially exempt from registration as they can opt for registration in a street name. This means that their stockholdings are combined to a larger pool of nominee registered holdings and cannot be separated from each other by scientific investigation.