This paper utilizes a rich literature on institutional investors' governance roles and develops simple measures of institutional discontent expressed through holding, trading and voice channels to predict hedge fund activism target selection. Discontent expressed through all three channels leads...

While Merton (1987) proposes that firm value increases with the number of shareholders, relatively few studies have explicitly sought to identify the factors that affect investor participation per se in equity markets. Using a unique dataset that measures the inflow and outflow of equity...

This paper provides evidence on the incidence, characteristics, and performance of activist engagements across countries. We find that the incidence of activism is greatest with high institutional ownership, particularly for U.S. institutions. We use a sample of 1,740 activist engagements across...

Conventional wisdom suggests that shareholder activism in REITs is less prevalent than in other (non-REIT) public firms because of stronger barriers to hostile takeovers and potentially less undervaluation. Our results, however, suggest that the conventional wisdom does not hold. Specifically,...

This study investigates whether institutional investors increase or decrease the volatility of stock returns in the Thai stock market. For the purpose we used the data from SETSMART, a database provided by the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). Our sample is a balanced panel data covering 3,160...

This paper analyzes the relation between security issue announcement returns and the choice between debt, equity, and not issuing. As in Myers and Majluf (1984), higher-valued firms do not issue, and hence security issues are associated with negative announcement effects. Firms that choose to...

This paper investigates the direct theoretical relationship between the variance of stock returns (σ2E) and financial leverage (L) considering both corporate and personal taxes. Using a dataset of U.S. industrial firms, we examine the variance of stock returns as a function of the firm’s...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

Do managers exercise accounting discretion in an opportunistic or efficient manner? Good governance structures, which mitigate agency costs, are necessary to ensure that the accounting information supplied by management is not opportunistically manipulated. The output of quality accounting...

Non-financial performance measures, such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) measures, are potentially leading indicators of firms' financial performance. I draw on the prior academic literature and the concept of ESG materiality to develop new corporate governance and ESG...