Surveying institutional investors on portfolio firms’ climate risk disclosures, we find that many think climate risk reporting to be as important as traditional financial reporting and that it should be mandatory and more standardized. We find...Read more
This Article examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that...Read more
We study under what conditions the voting process weeds out harmful shareholder proposals. We show that there is cross-sectional variation in the quality of shareholder proposals. Some of the proposals submitted by the most active individual...Read more
We study the impact of institutional investors' “voice” on 201 going private tender offers by controlling shareholders ("freeze-out" offers) in Israel. Israeli regulatory intervention in freeze-out tender offers is relatively mild, thus...Read more
Passive investors—ETFs and index funds—are the most important development in modern-day capital markets, dictating trillions of dollars in capital flows and increasingly owning much of corporate America. Neither the business model of passive...Read more
We propose a novel way of measuring the portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of 13F institutional investors (the “sustainability footprint”). We show that the environmental (social) footprint of institutional investors has...Read more
Hedge fund activism is associated with improvements in the governance and performance of targeted firms. In this paper, we show that these positive effects of activism reach beyond the targets, as non-targeted peers make similar improvements...Read more
For decades, corporate law played a pivotal role in regulating corporations across the United States. Consequently, Delaware, the leading state of incorporation, and its courts came to occupy a central and influential position in corporate law...Read more
This paper shows how network theory can improve our understanding of institutional investors’ voting behavior and, more generally, their role in corporate governance. The standard idea is that institutional investors compete against each other on...Read more
We estimate institutional investor preferences from proxy voting records. The W-NOMINATE method maps investors onto a left-right dimension based on votes for fiscal year 2012. Public pension funds and other investors on the left support a more...Read more
Widely-cited theoretical models predict that large shareholders will monitor management, while small shareholders will free-ride. However, we find that institutional investors are particularly likely to oppose management on Say-On-Pay for their...Read more
Boards are crucial to shareholder wealth. Yet, little is known about how shareholder oversight affects director incentives. Using exogenous industry shocks to institutional investor portfolios, we find that...Read more