Barry Ritholtz, Columnist

Where Have All the Public Companies Gone?

Companies that trade on exchanges have dropped by half since 1996.

June 24, 2015 at 1:54 PM UTC

Barry Ritholtz is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

Any wonder he doesn't seem busy?
Photographer: Eric Thayer/Getty Images

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The U.S. now has half as many publicly listed companies trading on its exchanges as it did at the peak in 1996. As the chart below shows, listed companies reached a high of 7,322. That number today is down almost by half to 3,700 and is more than 1,000 lower than in 1975.

Source: NBER, Political Calculations

Why the number of listings has fallen so precipitously is the focus of "The Listing Gap," a National Bureau of Economic Research report published last month. The authors, Craig Doidge of University of Toronto, G. Andrew Karolyi of Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and René M. Stulz of Ohio State University, suggest a number of reasons for the decline. Much of the data and trend analysis they performed runs counter to commonly accepted Wall Street wisdom.