This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

This paper studies communications between investors and firms as a form of corporate governance. The main premise is that activist investors cannot force their ideas on companies; they must persuade the board or other shareholders that implementing these ideas is beneficial to the firm. I show...

We show that there is cross-sectional variation in the quality of shareholder proposals. On average, the proposals submitted by the most active individual sponsors are less likely to be supported by a majority of votes, but they occasionally pass if shareholders mistakenly support them and may...

In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. In some cases shareholders are pushing companies to take actions that may reduce market value. It is hard to understand this behavior using the dominant corporate governance...

Blockholder monitoring is central to corporate governance, but blockholders large enough to exercise significant unilateral influence are rare. Mechanisms that enable small blockholders to exert collective influence are therefore important. We present a model in which one or more sizeable lead...

Activist hedge funds do not hold a sufficiently large number of shares to win proxy battles, and their success in driving corporate change relies on the willingness of institutional investors to support their cause. Against this background, this Article advances three claims about the...

Conventional wisdom suggests that shareholder activism in REITs is less prevalent than in other (non-REIT) public firms because of stronger barriers to hostile takeovers and potentially less undervaluation. Our results, however, suggest that the conventional wisdom does not hold. Specifically,...

When facing hedge fund activists, target firms often fight back. Targets with agency problems and those confronting the threat of investor coordination frequently engage in hostile resistance by implementing governance changes associated with managerial entrenchment. The market negatively...

We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to seek board representation when a larger share of the target company's stock is held by passively managed mutual funds....

We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative...

We study strategic trading by a blockholder who can intervene over time to influence the firm's cash flows. We consider the impact of asymmetric information on the incentives of the blockholder to trade, and study when information asymmetry increases blockholder ownership and leads to greater...

Manuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: This study examines activism campaigns where multiple activists simultaneously target the same firm—which we term clustered shareholder activism. Despite the growing influence of shareholder activism on corporate governance, the clustered...

The presentation is following the publication of two papers by the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations answering the question “Does hedge fund activism create long-term shareholder value?” In the presentation, the question is rephrased to consider whether activist...

This paper studies how hedge fund activism impacts corporate innovation. Firms targeted by activists improve their innovation efficiency over the five-year period following hedge fund intervention. Despite a tightening in R&D expenditures, target firms increase innovation output, as measured by...

We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative...

We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to pursue changes to corporate control or influence (e.g., via board representation) and to forego more incremental changes to...

This paper studies how hedge fund activism reshapes corporate innovation. Firms targeted by hedge fund activists experience an improvement in innovation efficiency during the five-year period following the intervention. Despite a tightening in R&D expenditures, target firms experience increases...

This paper studies how hedge fund activism reshapes corporate innovation. Firms targeted by hedge fund activists experience an improvement in innovation efficiency during the five-year period following the intervention. Despite a tightening in R&D expenditures, target firms experience increases...

We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative...

We analyze whether the growing importance of passive investors has influenced the campaigns, tactics, and successes of activists. We find activists are more likely to pursue changes to corporate control or influence (e.g., via board representation) and to forego more incremental changes to...

We develop a method to evaluate shareholder activism when an activist targets firms whose shareholders are diversified portfolio holders of possibly correlated firms. Our method of evaluation takes the portfolios of all of the shareholders, including the activist, as its basis of analysis. We...

German Abstract: ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Forschungsbericht untersucht das Dekarbonisierungspotenzial von Anlageportfolios deutscher Pensionskassen im Kontext des Klimawandels und zeigt ein konzeptionelles Vorgehen auf, um das tatsächliche Potenzial zu messen. Anhand des Klimawandel und...