A key objective of shareholder activists is to persuade a firm’s management to change its strategy. CFOs play an important role in negotiations, nonetheless activism research mainly focuses on CEOs. We examine the relationship between CFO overconfidence and the likelihood to get targeted by...

Using hand-collected data on CEO appointments during shareholder activism campaigns, this study examines whether shareholder involvement in CEO recruiting affects frictions in CEO hiring decisions. The results indicate that appointments of CEOs who are recruited with shareholder activist...

This paper proposes to exploit a reform in legal rules of corporate governance to identify contractual incentives from the correlation of executive pay and firm performance. In particular, we refer to a major shift in the legal and institutional environment, the reform of the German joint-stock...