In recent years there have been two parallel discussions taking place in the US and in the UK about the role which institutional shareholders should play in governing the corporation. In the US this discussion is around the idea of shareholder empowerment, in the UK it is around shareholder...

This paper examines the stock price reaction to cross-border spinoff announcements and investigates whether country characteristics (such as takeover market liquidity and investor protection) cause variation in the announcements' wealth effects. We observe a positive and significant price...

In this article, we examine whether internal governance, the process through which subordinate managers effectively monitor the chief executive officer (CEO), can improve a firm's liquidity. Using the difference in horizons between a CEO and his immediate subordinates to measure internal...

We show that corporate governance practices vary predictably across different types of blockholders. Nonfinancial blockholders are six times as likely to self-identify as active shareholders relative to financial blockholders. Textual analysis of regulatory filings reveals that nonfinancial...

An important issue in evaluating corporate governance is how to measure it. In prior work on emerging markets, we have advocated measuring firm-level governance using country-specific indices, tailored to each country's laws and institutions. An alternate approach, used in commercial indices, is...

Although a growing number of investors are engaging with sovereign entities on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, little academic research investigates this new form of investor activism. Applying universal ownership theory and drawing on eleven case studies of policy...