In 2017, “The Big Three” institutional investors launched campaigns to increase gender diversity on corporate boards. We estimate that their campaigns led firms to add at least 2.5 times as many female directors in 2019 as they had in 2016, accounting for most of the increase in board gender...

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 find that defined benefit employee pension plans of firms that are targets of hedge fund activism experience underfunding and their defined contribution plans experience reductions in employer contributions. Pension underfunding occurs due to reduced employer contributions to the plans, which...

Institutional investors are less likely to support shareholder proposals involving environmental and social issues for firms headquartered in Republican-led states. The lower support concentrates in recent years, when politicians became more vocal about firms' social responsibility activities,...

This study examines whether the use of tax haven subsidiaries by U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) is associated with more intense use of share buybacks and with improvement in management's ability to generating revenues. I find that MNCs' more intensive tax haven subsidiary use is...

We use new data from SEC filings to investigate how S&P 500 firms execute their open market repurchase programs. We find that smaller S&P 500 firms repurchase less frequently than larger firms, and at a price which is significantly lower than the average market price. Their repurchase activity...

This paper explores the impact of target CEOs' retirement preferences on takeovers. Using retirement age as proxy for CEOs' private merger costs, we find strong evidence that target CEOs' preferences affect merger activity. The likelihood of receiving a successful takeover bid is sharply higher...

Using data from bank holding company regulatory reports, we examine the relationshipbetween stock repurchases and financial performance for a large sample of bank holding companies over the years 1987 to 1998. The primary result is that higher levels of repurchases in one year are associated...

This statement presents my views on buybacks and my general reactions to provisions in four pieces of legislation relating to stock buybacks. Part I describes the role of stock buybacks in the economy and offers some “investor-benign” explanations for firms' use of repurchases rather than...

In this paper, I study the valuation effects of cross listing in the U.S. for a panel of emerging market firms over the period from 1990 to 2003. In line with Kristian-Hope et al. (2007), I find that only those firms from high disclosure regimes gain from Level 2/3 listing in the U.S. The gains...