This paper provides benchmarks for monitoring costs and evaluates the net returns to shareholder activism. I model … activism as a sequential decision process consisting of demand negotiations, board representation, and proxy contest and … estimate the costs of each activism stage. A campaign ending in a proxy fight has average costs of $10.71 million. I find that …

Hedge fund managers trade off the benefits of leveraging on the alpha-generating strategy against the costs of … inefficient fund liquidation. In contrast to the standard risk-seeking intuition, even with a constant-return-to-scale alpha …