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 test the empirical validity of a claim that has been playing a central role in debates on corporate governance — the claim that interventions by activist hedge funds have a detrimental effect on the long-term interests of companies and their shareholders. We subject this claim to a...

This paper investigates the role of institutional trading in the emergence of hedge fund activism – an important corporate governance mechanism. We demonstrate that institutional sales raise a firm's probability of becoming an activist target. Further, by exploiting the funding circumstances...

This paper utilizes a rich literature on institutional investors' governance roles and develops simple measures of institutional discontent expressed through holding, trading and voice channels to predict hedge fund activism target selection. Discontent expressed through all three channels leads...

Shareholder activism has sharply increased over the past decade and spread both across countries and among different types of investors. Today, 50% of all engagements occur outside North America, with non-hedge fund investors accounting for one-third of all engagements. We investigate the...

This paper examines the effectiveness of hedge fund activism in preventing corporate policy deviations. Whereas previous studies focus on policy changes in target firms after intervention, I examine proactive policy changes in all firms that face a threat of intervention. Using mutual fund fire...

I examine how institutional investment horizon affects hedge fund activism. I find that hedge fund activism is higher in firms that long-term institutional investors invest. Furthermore, hedge fund campaigns and success rates differ with investment horizon of institutions. Firms with investors...

Hedge fund activism generates persistent performance, but heterogeneity in performance suggests that some hedge fund activists are more skilled than others. We use a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Bayesian estimation algorithm to isolate a time-invariant activist-specific skill component from...

This paper analyses the short- and long-term effects of shareholder activism by hedge funds in German publicly listed companies. Using a hand-collected sample of investments between 1999 and 2010, I show that hedge funds are largely ineffective in substantially affecting the firms they invest...

Hedge fund activism has been identified in the USA as a driver of enduring corporate governance change and market perception. We investigate this claim in an empirical study to see whether activism produced similar results in Japan in four representative areas: management effectiveness,...