Shareholder Activism: A Multidisciplinary Review

‘Low-Cost’ Shareholder Activism: A Review of the Evidence

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 ...

Returns to Shareholder Activism: Evidence from a Clinical Study of the Hermes UK Focus Fund

This article reports a unique analysis of private engagements by an activist fund. It is based on data made available to us by Hermes, the fund manager owned by the British Telecom Pension Scheme, on engagements with management in companies targeted by its UK Focus Fund. In contrast with most previous studies of activism, we report that the fund executes shareholder activism predominantly throu...

“Say on Pay” Shareholder Advisory Votes on Executive Compensation: The New Frontier of Corporate Governance Activism

Research Notes and Commentaries Investor Activism, Managerial Responsiveness, and Corporate Social Performance

We study relationships between shareholder proposal activism, managerial response, and corporate social performance (CSP). We find that shareholder proposal activism reduces CSP. We infer that rather than pressuring firms to improve CSP, activism may engender diversion of resources away from CSP into political activities used by managers to resist external pressures and retain discretion. We al...