Sky Blog
Much of the debate about activist shareholders is informed by experience in Northern Hemisphere markets, particularly the United States. In my recently published book, I examine the topic from an Australian perspective.
Australia is ideal for exploring shareholder activism for …
What is the right governance framework for a public company? This question sits at the core of decades of empirical and theoretical research, and yet we still lack consensus on an answer. In particular, agency-cost essentialists support governance structures that …
Shareholder activists are often accused of having short investment horizons and thus pushing companies to increase their stock prices at the expense of long-term shareholder value (“short-termism”). These accusations have prompted extensive research on interventions by hedge funds. In a …
For decades, Delaware and federal law governing contests for corporate control have focused on building walls to keep corporate raiders outside the gates, while doing relatively little to stop activist hedge funds. The prevailing academic view has been similar: Scholars …
Hedge fund activism is a topic on which most law professors have closed their minds. They learned in student days that activist hedge funds are excellent agents of change that efficiently discipline managements at targeted firms and increase shareholder wealth. …
Hedge fund activism has generated a large amount of public debate. On one side, the hedge fund activists and their academic cheerleaders argue that hedge fund activism is good for shareholders and society at large. On the other side, potential …
Debate continues to rage among politicians, professors, senior lawyers, and members of the media over the regulation of hedge fund activism. The primary criticism is that, in the absence of merger and acquisition activity, such activism does not create value …
In the past few years, investors have begun to embrace the reality that academics have been championing for decades—that a broad-based passive indexing strategy is superior to picking individual stocks or actively managed mutual funds. As a result, millions of …
This is the heyday of institutional investor activism in proxy contests. Insurgents are running more slates and targeting larger companies. They are also enjoying a higher rate of success: 66% of proxy contexts this year have been at least partially …