Enforcement problems plague shareholder activism and investor protection in many parts of the world. The importance of solving this problem has led scholars to consider a range of partial alternatives to weak domestic corporate law enforcement regimes, ranging from writing "self enforcing"...

We document that corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities increase the cost of equity in East Asia. Further, the effect is driven by economies with weak investor protection. Our findings are robust to alternative variable measurements, accounting for endogeneity of CSR, and various...

On November 14th, 2014, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum – and CNMV, Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores – the Spanish Authority for supervision of securities markets – jointly organized a conference in Madrid: Challenges in Securities Markets Regulation: Investor...

In a democracy, a political majority can influence both the corporategovernance structure and the return to human and financial capital.We argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently diffused, thereis political support for a strong governance role for dispersed equitymarket investors, and...

This paper investigates whether gender diversity in the boardroom is associated with corporate cash holdings and whether investor protection moderates the effect of corporate board gender diversity on corporate cash holdings. Using 20,750 firm-year observations from 33 countries, our analyses...

Using a parsimonious measure of investor protection constructed from fund organizational characteristics, this paper documents that companies targeted by activists with better investor protection structures outperform those targeted by poor-investor-protection activists by roughly 10% per year....

Online trading platforms and internet communities facilitate access to financial markets and let investors reduce transaction and coordination costs. In this way: (1) they permit many people to be directed towards a single goal, but, at the same time, (2) they allow operations aimed at...

This paper argues that the key mechanisms protecting retail investors' financial stake in their portfolio investments are indirect. They do not rely on actions by the investors or by any private actor directly charged with looking after investors' interests. Rather, they are provided by the...