Investor Relations, Engagement, and Shareholder Activism

Soft Shareholder Activism

This paper studies voice and exit as mechanisms of shareholder activism when obtaining costly formal control is not feasible. Different from the existing literature, voice is interpreted as a strategic transmission of information from an activist investor to an opportunistic manager. The analysis provides several results. First, voice and exit exhibit complementarity, and hence, exit can be an ...

Shareholder Activism: A Multidisciplinary Review

When Does Institutional Investor Activism Increase Shareholder Value?: The Carbon Disclosure Project

This paper presents the first empirical test of the financial impacts of institutional investor activism towards climate change. Specifically, we study the conditions under which share prices are increased for the Financial Times (FT) Global 500 companies due to participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a consortium of institutional investors with $57 trillion in assets. We find no ...

Entrepreneurial Shareholder Activism: Hedge Funds and Other Private Investors

We examine recent confrontational activism campaigns by hedge funds and other private investors. The main parallels between the groups are a significantly positive market reaction for the target firm around the initial Schedule 13D filing date, significantly positive returns over the subsequent year, and the activist’s high success rate in achieving its original objective. Further, both activis...

Investor Relations and Regulation FD

We examine the differential impact of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) on firms with an established professional investor relations (IR) presence at the time of the regulation. About 25% of publicly listed firms employ a professional IR member yet we know relatively little about the role of IR. We find IR firms more than double their level of public disclosure post-Reg FD consistent with Reg...