Stewardship

Does Money Talk? Divestitures and Corporate Environmental and Social Policies

Can shareholders’ divestitures and threats of exit trigger improvements in firms’ environmental and social (E&S) policies? We show that...

The Uncertain Stewardship Potential of Index Funds

Regulators and commentators around the world are increasingly demanding that institutional investors engage in stewardship with respect to their...

The Global ESG Stewardship Ecosystem

There is growing interest in the phenomenon of international or transnational corporate law. This development is marked by its complexity. It involves...

Why Do Retail Investors Make Costly Mistakes? An Experiment on Mutual Fund Choice

There is mounting evidence that retail investors make predictable, costly investment mistakes, including underinvestment, naïve...

Good Activist/Bad Activist: The Rise of International Stewardship Codes

This paper focuses on recent trends in shareholder participation in corporate governance in a number of major developed countries. Conflicting...

Outsourcing Active Ownership in Japan

This paper examines active ownership in Japan by an equity ownership service, Governance for Owners Japan (GOJ). GOJ engages with...

Hedge Fund Activism

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

Shifting Influences on Corporate Governance: Capital Market Completeness and Policy Channeling

Corporate governance scholarship is typically portrayed as driven by single factor models, for example, shareholder value maximization, director...

The Corporate Governance of Defined Benefit Pension Plans: Evidence from the United Kingdom

This paper studies the governance of defined-benefit pension plans in the United Kingdom. We construct a governance measure, equal to the proportion of...

Socially Responsible Investments: Methodology, Risk Exposure and Performance

Shareholder Stewardship in India: The Desiderata

The goal of this paper is to examine whether the stewardship code, which emanated in circumstances that are specific to the United Kingdom (UK), is...

The Benefits of Access: Evidence from Private Meetings with Portfolio Firms

We analyze over 4,700 private meetings between a large active asset manager and portfolio firms, unobservable to outsiders. These meetings are...