This paper provides new evidence that correlated abnormal compensation of CEOs and directors is symptomatic of agency problems associated with cronyism. We find that director abnormal compensation has a negative impact on the likelihood of CEO turnover and reduces the sensitivity of CEO turnover...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

This study tests two opposing views of institutional investors – monitoring versus expropriation – by investigating whether institutional ownership is positively or negatively related to future firm-specific stock price crash risk. We present robust evidence that institutional ownership is...

This paper examines the pattern and profitability of institutional trades around takeover announcements. We find that the trades of funds as a group, either before or after takeover announcements, are not profitable. However, funds whose main broker is also a target advisor are net buyers of...

We focus on chronically underperforming firms and assess the roles of institutional investors in either facilitating asset redeployment or entrenching managers. We find that, in aggregate, institutions exhibit a flight to quality, selling shares in firms that subsequently fail. For...

Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activities are not well-anticipated corporate events in the equity market. Do institutional investors possess material non-public information before M&A announcements? Using a novel methodology that infers high frequency institutional trading, this paper investigates...

This paper examines whether one of the most important participants in the takeover market, the institutional investors of target companies, suffers from the disposition effect; and if so, how this selling bias influences the takeover outcomes. I report robust evidence that target institutional...

This study tests two opposing views of institutional investors — monitoring versus short-termism. We present evidence that institutional investor stability is negatively associated with one-year-ahead stock price crash risk, consistent with the monitoring theory of institutional investors but...

We argue that a fundamental reason for the short term perspective of corporate executives is the short-term orientation of shareholders and financial markets that drive the performance benchmarks of CEOs. In our view, long-term committed shareholders can provide substantial benefits to the...

We assess the diverse roles of institutional investors in impacting survival and performance of chronically underperforming firms and contrast the results for consistently overperforming firms. We find material differences in institutional investor roles between these two samples....