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Discussion Paper
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
Activist shareholders play a central role in modern corporations, influencing the capital structure, business strategy, and governance of firms. Such “blockholders” range from investors who actively jawbone or break up firms to index funds that are largely passive in that they limit themselves to voting. In between, however, is a key group of blockholders that have historically focused on trading but have embraced activism as an established business strategy in the past few decades. Campaigns involving such “trading” blockholders have become ubiquitous, increasingly targeting ...
Report
Signaling with Private Monitoring
A sender signals her private information to a receiver who privately monitors the sender’s behavior, while the receiver transmits his private inferences back through an imperfect public signal of his actions. In a linear-quadratic-Gaussian setup in continuous time, we construct linear Markov equilibria, where the state variables are the players’ beliefs up to the sender’s second order belief. This state is an explicit function of the sender’s past play—hence, her private information—which leads to separation through the second-order belief channel. We examine the implications of ...
Report
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Shareholder Activism
Motivated by the rise of hedge fund activism, we consider a leader blockholder and a follower counterpart who first trade in sequence to build their blocks and then intervene in a firm. With endogenous fundamentals and steering dynamics, the leader ceases to trade in an unpredictable way: she buys or sells to induce the follower to acquire a larger block and thus spend more resources to improve firm value. Key is that the activists have correlated private information—initial blocks, firms' fundamentals, or their own productivity—so that prices either overreact or underreact to order ...