We find that investors responded positively to a mandated gender quota in Korea, which requires large public firms to include at least one female director on their boards. Investor responses were more positive for firms with high risk, weak corporate governance, and poor social performance,...

Blockholder disclosure thresholds shape incentives for hedge fund activism, which are jointly determined with real investment and managerial behavior. Uninformed investors value lower thresholds (greater transparency) when the cost of trading against an informed activist outweighs the benefits...

As blockholders in most public firms, the "Big Three"" passive fund managers — Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street — have an outsized influence on shareholder voting. While these investors tend to vote according to management's recommendations, it is unclear whether they are overly...

Lines in the broader short versus long-term battle have been drawn between various camps: those favoring corporate management versus those favoring shareholder activists; those believing that corporations are best run for the exclusive benefit of shareholders versus those believing that other...

In order to encourage meaningful and constructive engagement, countries have promulgated and published stewardship codes. The distinctiveness of such codes is the attempt to create more responsible and purposeful investor engagement. In particular, institutional investors must be viewed – and...

Short selling has the potential to improve the efficiency and fairness of equity markets. Yet institutional investors face both private and regulatory constraints to short selling. We document these obstacles and consider the potential benefits of removing them. We advocate that institutional...

We investigate whether business ties with portfolio firms influence mutual funds' proxy voting using a comprehensive data set spanning 2003 to 2011. In contrast to prior literature, we find that business ties significantly influence pro-management voting at the level of individual pairs of fund...

Notwithstanding the focus on hedge fund activism, fundamental questions remain. How much does hedge fund activism really matter? What has academic study contributed to the understanding of hedge fund activism? And what, if anything, does research on hedge fund activism illuminate about the...

We test the empirical validity of a claim that has been playing a central role in debates on corporate governance — the claim that interventions by activist hedge funds have a detrimental effect on the long-term interests of companies and their shareholders. We subject this claim to a...