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...

Three reasons explain active equity manager underperformance. First, as is now better understood, the returns to passive index component firms often are asymmetrically distributed with a mean larger than than the median, implying that random portfolio selection from index firms is likely to...