“Offensive shareholder activism” involves buying up sizeable stakes in underperforming companies and agitating for changes predicted to increase shareholder returns. Though hedge funds are currently highly publicized practitioners of this corporate governance tactic, there has been no...

Through the TARP program, the government became a substantial equity holder in five major U.S. companies: American International Group, Inc.(AIG), Citigroup Inc. (Citigroup), General Motors Company (GM), Chrysler Group LLC (Chrysler), and GMAC Inc.(GMAC), now known as Ally Financial Inc. (Ally)....

In the past decade, as a result of many interrelated changes in the economic environment, the role and the pressures on the corporate governance of firms have been significantly transformed in the US and the UK. To test the magnitude of this changed environment, we study one aspect of corporate...