The Activist Investor Blog
The Activist Investor Blog
Current Academic Research on Activist Investing
We update our bibliography of activist investing research every few months. Since we last did so in November 2014, we’ve seen several interesting and useful papers, so it makes sense to do it again. How about some beach or lake reading?
The bibliography represents the best available scholarly work on two significant questions: the impact of activist investing on shareholder returns, and the impact of corp gov improvements on shareholder returns.
We highlight a few papers in our weekly digest of activist investing news and commentary. We add the best of these papers to the bibliography.
We continue to build the theory and evidence about the returns to activist investing. Six(!) recent papers add to that theory and evidence.
Becht, et. al. add to the analysis of international activist investing performance. They show that non-US activist investors generally outperform US ones.
We have two papers, one new and one updating an earlier analysis, on the long-term impact of activist investors. Goodwin, et. al. contribute to the evidence with “Myopic Investor Myth Debunked”, and show how over five years, activist investing delivers positive excess returns.
And, Bebchuk, Brav, and Jiang update their earlier paper on the same subject, and published it in the Columbia Law Review last month.
Two efforts now analyze differences among hedge fund activist investors. Boyson, Ma, and Mooradian find that hedge fund skill, rather than mere reputation, explains why some portfolio managers do better than others.
Krishnan, Partnoy, and Thomas also analyze a number of attributes of hedge fund activist investors. They create a novel scoring methodology for these investors, and contribute to understanding why, exactly, some investors perform better than others.
Finally, we have a current survey of the existing literature on activist investing performance. Denes, Karpoff, and McWilliams compile 67 other studies into “Thirty Years of Shareholder Activism: A Survey of Empirical Research”. They identify the trends toward operational improvements and larger, more professional activist investors.
We’ve not seen any recent scholarly research that analyzes the impact of improved corp gov on equity returns, though. We welcome any suggestions, on that subject or others that make sense for the bibliography.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015