The power of short-term shareholders in widely-held public firms is widely blamed for “short-termism”: directors and executives feel pressured to boost the short-term stock price at the expense of creating long-term economic value. The recent financial crisis, which many attribute to the influence of short-term shareholders, has renewed and intensified these concerns.

To reduce short-termism, reformers have sought to strengthen the number and power of long-term shareholders in public corporations. For example, the Aspen Institute has recommended imposing a fee on securities transactions and making favorable long-term capital gains rates available only to investors that own shares for much longer than a year. Underlying these proposals is a long-standing and largely uncontested belief: that long-term shareholders, unlike short-term shareholders, will want managers to maximize the economic pie created by the firm.

I recently posted a paper on SSRN explaining why this rosy view of long-term shareholders is wrong. In my paper, The Uneasy Case for Favoring Long-term Shareholders, I demonstrate that long-term shareholder interests do not align with maximizing the economic pie created by the firm – even when shareholders are the only residual claimants on the firm’s value. In fact, long-term shareholder interests might be less well aligned with maximizing the economic pie than short-term shareholder interests. In short, we can’t count on long-term shareholders to be better stewards of the firm simply because they hold their shares for a longer period of time.

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