Up to the late 1990s, there was little evidence that shareholder activism generated any economically meaningful improvements in share prices or the operating performance of corporations. By the early 2000s, however, a new form of shareholder activism began to emerge: shareholder activism by...

Based on recent evidence, we may not be able to reject the hypothesis that the cost of equity for individual common stocks is close to the risk-free rate. One explanation for this outcome would be the combination of excessive optimism with risk aversion, a combination that can generate behavior...