In this paper, we consider the corporate governance challenge of protecting outside investors in listed, controlled firms. European jurisdictions are supposed to be more veteran and skilled in dealing with these firms in comparison to the U.S. But we argue that outside investors in European...

We show firms pay more dividends and repurchase more shares when they have higher levels of institutional ownership, even if the institutions are not activist investors. We also find evidence of an effect of institutional ownership on proxy voting, profitability, R&D, and CEO compensation. Our...

Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders are more likely to...

This paper documents that site visits as a type of soft activism, increase corporate cashdividend in the post-event year. The casual link is built by using both quasi-naturalexperiment and instrument variable approach. Site visits facilitate communicationamong outside investors and incumbent...

We document a positive relation between shareholder monitoring and total payout to shareholders. This relation is stronger for firms with greater potential for agency problems. We also show that monitoring is positively associated with future improvements in payout, operating performance, and...

Differences in management and shareholders priorities have been recognized and accepted to exist creating problems in the agency to which financial theorists opined that dividend payments is the best means of resolving the conflict. Results obtained using the multiple regression equation model...

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of foreign institutional investors on the relationship between political connection and tunneling. To achieve this goal, our study has examined all companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange between 2015 and 2019, and obtained...

I study the role of institutional stock ownership in facilitating flexibility in firms' payout policy by examining payout reductions during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Treating the financial crisis as a systemic, negative shock to firms' access to capital markets, I find that firms with...

This study addresses the debate over the relation between institutional ownership and dividend payout through the lens of the agency theory. We hypothesize that only institutional investors with certain traits are likely to monitor and conditioning on firms' financial performance, they will use...

Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...