This paper investigates the link between voting transparency and voting behaviour in asset managers, and its implications for corporate monitoring. Our results show that the more effort asset managers put into disclosure, the higher their dissention rate, suggesting that the duty asset managers...

Over the past two decades, hedge fund activism has emerged as a new mechanism of corporate governance that brings about operational, financial and governance reforms to a corporation. Many prominent business executives and legal scholars are convinced that the entire American economy will suffer...

Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders are more likely to...

We investigate whether corporations and their executives react to an exogenous change in passive institutional ownership and alter their corporate governance structure. We find that exogenous increases in passive ownership lead to increases in CEO power and fewer new independent director...

This paper investigates the link between voting transparency and voting behaviour in asset managers, and its implications for corporate monitoring. Our results show that the more effort asset managers put into disclosure, the higher their dissention rate, suggesting that the duty asset managers...

Does corporate governance structure matter for firm value? We develop a model in which the allocation of control rights between shareholders and managers (“governance structure”) affects managers' incentive to invest (strong governance tightens managerial freedom and weak governance loosens...

We argue that a common practice of evaluating portfolio managers relative to a benchmark has real effects. Benchmarking generates additional, inelastic demand for assets inside the benchmark. This leads to a "benchmark inclusion subsidy:" a firm inside the benchmark values an investment project...

We find that lenders today rely on less restrictive financial covenants than 20 years ago, resulting in a nearly 70% drop in the annual proportion of U.S. public firms reporting a loan covenant violation. To study this decline, we develop a simple model of optimal covenant design that balances...

Existing studies show that common institutional ownership of multiple industry firms improves governance over management, because such common owners possess industry-wide information advantage and governance expertise. This paper studies whether creditors perceive common owners as allied...