The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Fri, 11 Jun 2021 14:18:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.2 Shareholder Activism and Voluntary Disclosure https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2015/10/21/shareholder-activism-and-voluntary-disclosure/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2015/10/21/shareholder-activism-and-voluntary-disclosure/#respond Wed, 21 Oct 2015 13:02:13 +0000 http://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=71855?d=20151022093815EDT Posted by Jordan Schoenfeld, University of Utah, on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Editor's Note: Jordan Schoenfeld is Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Utah. This post is based on an article authored by Professor Schoenfeld and Thomas Bourveau, Assistant Professor of Accounting at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang (discussed on the Forum here), The Myth that Insulating Boards Serves Long-Term Value by Lucian Bebchuk (discussed on the Forum here), The Law and Economics of Blockholder Disclosure by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert J. Jackson Jr. (discussed on the Forum here), and Pre-Disclosure Accumulations by Activist Investors: Evidence and Policy by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Robert J. Jackson Jr., and Wei Jiang.

Information is the foundation on which traders form their beliefs about a company and ultimately their investment decisions. In empirical settings, information often arrives in the form of a company disclosure. Since managers have significant discretion over disclosure, researchers have extensively studied the relation between disclosure and trading via the price system. In our paper, Shareholder Activism and Voluntary Disclosure, which was recently made available on SSRN, we study the relation between disclosure and a specific class of traders, shareholder activists. The activism literature has only indirectly explored the link between company disclosures and activism. For example, several papers include financial statement variables as regressors in their empirical models of activist targeting (e.g., Brav, Jiang, Partnoy, and Thomas, 2008). We extend this literature by looking at disclosure explicitly.

(more…)

]]> https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2015/10/21/shareholder-activism-and-voluntary-disclosure/feed/ 0