Activist NGOs have increasingly foregone public politics and turned to private politics to change the practices of firms and industries. This paper focuses on private politics, activist strategies, and nonmarket strategies of targets. A formal theory of an encounter between an activist organization and a target is presented to examine strategies for lessening the chance of being a target and fo...

Does activist investors’ focus on short-term stock prices impede their role in improving corporate governance? This model builds on the notion that both the act of intervention and the threat of an intervention can generate value for the target firm. We demonstrate that an activist with short-termism intervenes excessively (insufficiently) when her ability to conduct a value-enhancing intervent...

Private politics social pressure in led by social activists that use confrontational and cooperative strategies to cause firms to provide social benefits. This paper presents theories of the supply of social pressure by activists and the demand for social pressure as represented by the attractiveness of firms as targets and partners. A confrontational activist can drive potential targets into c...

We build a model of activist campaigns against corporations that captures both their direct impact through private politics, and their indirect impact through changing targeted firms’ incentives to engage in public politics. A strategic activist seeks to transform the behavior of an industry, and influence it to adopt a costly green technology that will reduce environmental damages. To do so, t...

The key theoretical idea in this paper is that activist groups contribute resources to their favored parties in response to policy concessions from the parties. These resources are then used by a party to enhance the leader’s valence — the electoral perception of the quality of the party leader. The equilibrium result is that parties, in order to maximize vote share, will balance a centripetal ...

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 ...

We present a simple macroeconomic model that includes a role for an asset-price bubble. We then derive optimal monetary policy settings for two policymakers: a skeptic, for whom the best forecast of future asset prices is the current price; and an activist, whose policy recommendations take into account the complete stochastic implications of the bubble. We show that the activist’s recommendati...