There is significant debate about the usefulness of disclosing the relative pay of the CEO and the median employee (hereafter, pay ratio), as required under the yet-to-be implemented Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States. Using an experiment, we find that disclosing...

In this study we examine the relation between corporate governance and institutional ownership. Our empirical results show that the fraction of a company's shares that are held by institutional investors increases with the quality of its governance structure. In a similar vein, we show that the...

This paper demonstrates the existence of different institutional investor preferences for equity characteristics, and makes the link between these preferences and firm value. We show that transient institutional investors (those that trade frequently with a view to maximizing short term gains)...

We examine overconfident CEO directors and find they attend more board meetings, are more likely to serve on the nominating or the compensation committee, have more independent directorships, and foster higher attendance rates on boards. Boards with overconfident directors are more likely to...

I document an abnormal increase in the price of default insurance for target firms at the time of an activist hedge fund intervention, despite an abnormal decrease in expected default losses. After the intervention, credit spreads remain abnormally high for confrontational activist campaigns but...

Institutional investors report that they prefer to invest in firms with greater board independencedespite the fact that researchers have been unable to demonstrate a link between boardindependence and firm performance. We investigate whether differences among institutionalinvestors affect these...

We examine whether institutions' monitoring effectiveness is related to the number of their blockholdings. We find that the number of blocks that a firm's large institutions hold is positively associated with forced chief executive officer (CEO) turnover-performance sensitivity, abnormal returns...

Passive institutional investors are an increasingly important component of U.S. stock ownership. To examine whether and by which mechanisms passive investors influence firms' governance, we exploit variation in ownership by passive mutual funds associated with stock assignments to the Russell...

Using unique data on investor views of EDGAR company filings, we document that many investors devote significant effort towards governance research. However, investors' monitoring is focused disproportionately on large firms and firms with meetings outside the busy spring proxy season. Using an...