We show that corporate governance practices vary predictably across different types of blockholders. Nonfinancial blockholders are six times as likely to self-identify as active shareholders relative to financial blockholders. Textual analysis of regulatory filings reveals that nonfinancial...

We identify a sample of firms with directors employed by institutional investors and examine the effect of a direct channel of institutional monitoring. Using difference-in-differences tests, we find weak evidence that institutional directors have a positive effect on informational efficiency....

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...

Corporate governance and firm disclosure are endogenously determined. We exploit locally exogenous variations in corporate governance created by "close-call" governance-related shareholder proposals, using a fuzzy RDD and the techniques developed in text analytics to examine whether better...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

The lack of diversity across gender and race of corporate boards has been one of the most significant issues in corporate board governance in recent years. Given the critical role that shareholders have in approving director appointments, we analyze voting patterns in director elections to...

This paper examines why institutional shareholders frequently oppose activists when activism increases the value of target firms. Because institutions underweight targets and activism could adversely affect the values of rival firms, institutional investors often lack incentives to support...

In this article, in addition to understanding what are the elements and stages that have guided the formation of a corporate culture in the ESG area, we focus on two specificities: the distinctive traits of the board of directors, on the one hand, and the relationship between ESG performance and...

Information asymmetry between shareholders and corporate managers can subvert contemporary calls for increased institutional investor oversight. In jurisdictions where controlling shareholders are common, information asymmetry can also arise between minority shareholders and controlling...

This study examines the role of foreign institutional ownership in corporate social responsibility. Using the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect as a quasi-natural experiment, our difference-in-differences estimation shows that foreign institutional ownership drives firms’ CSR improvements....