Incentives to Corporate Governance Activism

This paper considers incentives faced by investors (financial institutions) to become actively involved in the governance of under-performing companies in their portfolio as recently proposed. By considering the private benefits and the costs of investor activism separately, it questions the conventional wisdom -based on simplistic agency theory - that share ownership is so widely held in the UK that such incentives are too weak for shareholder activism to be a rational basis of a system of corporate governance. It finds that in many cases, by contrast, these incentives would be very strong indeed if conflicts of interest could be avoided.