This paper examines the impact on shareholder voting of the mutual fund voting disclosure regulation adopted by the SEC in 2003, using a paired sample of management proposals on executive equity incentive compensation plans submitted before and after the rule change. While voting support for...

We introduce a new measure of active portfolio management, Active Share, which represents the share of portfolio holdings that differ from the benchmark index holdings. We compute Active Share for domestic equity mutual funds from 1980 to 2003. We relate Active Share to fund characteristics such...

This paper explores the economic role credit rating agencies play in the corporate bond market. We consider three existing theories about multiple ratings: information production, rating shopping and regulatory certification. Using differences in rating composition, default prediction and credit...

We use a novel sample of separate accounts to perform an out-of-sample test of the predictive power of active share (Cremers and Petajisto, 2009). While active share has limited predictive power unconditionally, it has significant power conditional on past performance. We find strong positive...

We examine how active share—the extent to which a portfolio's holdings differ from its benchmark's holdings—affects the performance, risk management, and flows of bond mutual funds. Measuring active share at both the issue and issuer level, the average bond fund has an issue-level...

This paper introduces a recently developed consistent statistic by Bai and Ng (2002) to determine the number of factors in an approximate multifactor model. We use this new approach to study a recent work by Lo and Wang (2000), which shows that a multifactor asset-pricing model not only imposes...

This paper considers the impact of takeover (or acquisition) likelihood on firm valuation. If firms are more likely to acquire during times when they have free cash and/or when the required rate of return is low, takeover targets become more sensitive to shocks to aggregate cash flows and/or to...

Prices of equity index put options contain information on the price of systematic downward jump risk. We use a structural jump-diffusion firm value model to assess the level of credit spreads that is generated by option-implied jump risk premia. In our compound option pricing model, an equity...

We investigate the effects of shareholder governance mechanisms on bondholders and document two new findings. First, the impact of shareholder control (proxied by large institutional blockholders) on credit risk depends on takeover vulnerability. Shareholder control is associated with higher...