This paper analyses the short- and long-term effects of shareholder activism by hedge funds in German publicly listed companies. Using a hand-collected sample of investments between 1999 and 2010, I show that hedge funds are largely ineffective in substantially affecting the firms they invest...

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We provide a direct test of this prediction in a representative sample of the Dutch population. Using individual-level data on return expectations for a broad...