Institutional Investors

Institutional Investors as Minority Shareholders

Hedge Fund Activism

We examine recent confrontational shareholder activism campaigns by hedge funds and by other private investors. The three main parallels between the...

Do Institutional Investors Monitor their Large-Scale vs. Small-Scale Investments Differently? Evidence from the Say-On-Pay Vote

We examine the relation between an institution’s stock ownership and its tendency to support corporate management through the “Say-on-Pay”...

Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, and Policy

Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor,...

Corporate Governance Through Voice and Exit

How do active managers engage with portfolio firms? And, what role does monitoring and engagement play in their trading decisions? We use proprietary...

Understanding the (Ir)Relevance of Shareholder Votes on M&A Deals

Has corporate law and its bundles of fiduciary obligations become irrelevant? Over the last thirty years, the American public corporation has...

Do Institutional Investors Stabilize Equity Markets in Crisis Periods? Evidence from COVID-19

During the COVID-19 crash, U.S. stocks with higher institutional ownership performed worse. This under-performance was unrelated to revisions in...

Coordinated Engagements

We study the nature of and outcomes from coordinated engagements by a prominent international network of long-term shareholders cooperating to...

Institutional Investors in China: Corporate Governance and Policy Channeling in the Market Within the State

The extraordinary rise of China’s economy has made understanding Chinese corporate governance an issue of global importance. A rich literature has...

The Effects of Credible Voluntary Disclosures: Institutional Investor Engagement and Investees’ ESG Performances

We study the effectiveness of institutional investor engagement on the ESG performance of a sample of UK firms listed in the FTSE 350 Index. To measure the...

Does Governance Travel around the World? Evidence from Institutional Investors

We examine whether institutional investors affect corporate governance by analyzing portfolio holdings of institutions in companies from 23...

Wolf Pack Activism

Blockholder monitoring is central to corporate governance, but blockholders large enough to exercise significant unilateral influence are rare....