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...

Over the past two decades, private equity has contributed to a shrinking of the U.S. stock market. We develop a political economy model of private equity activity to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that private and social incentives to delist firms from the stock...

This paper investigates under what circumstances boards of directors fire CEOs and whether this action leads to better firm performance. We use unique and detailed data, covering 473 companies in the transition region, on boards’ actions, expectations and beliefs about CEO ability. We find...