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Working Paper
Reputation and Investor Activism: A Structural Approach
We measure the impact of reputation for proxy fighting on investor activism by estimating a dynamic model in which activists engage a sequence of target firms. Our estimation produces an evolving reputation measure for each activist and quantifies its impact on campaign frequency and outcomes. We find that high reputation activists initiate 3.5 times as many campaigns and extract 85% more settlements from targets, and that reputation-building incentives explain 20% of campaign initiations and 19% of proxy fights. Our estimates indicate these reputation effects combine to nearly double the ...
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Reputation and Sovereign Default
This paper presents a continuous-time model of sovereign debt. In it, a relatively impatient sovereign government?s hidden type switches back and forth between a commitment type, which cannot default, and an optimizing type, which can default on the country?s debt at any time, and assume outside lenders have particular beliefs regarding how a commitment type should borrow for any given level of debt and bond price. We show that if these beliefs satisfy reasonable assumptions, in any Markov equilibrium, the optimizing type mimics the commitment type when borrowing, revealing its type only by ...
Working Paper
Reputation and Investor Activism
We show that an activist's reputation is a critical determinant of the success of their campaigns. We model reputation as target managers' belief about the activist's willingness to initiate a proxy fight. Our model indicates reputation, rather than stake size, induces managers to settle without a proxy fight. We present empirical evidence supporting our model's predictions: target companies more-frequently increase payouts, change management or board composition, engage in a merger or acquisition, or otherwise reorganize in response to high reputation activist campaigns, while target actions ...
Working Paper
Can Reputation Discipline the Gig Economy? Experimental Evidence from an Online Labor Market
Just as employers face uncertainty when hiring workers, workers also face uncertainty when accepting employment, and bad employers may opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, and laws. However, prior research in economics and information sciences has focused sharply on the employer?s problem of identifying good workers rather than vice versa. This issue is especially pronounced in markets for gig work, including online labor markets, where platforms are developing strategies to help workers identify good employers. We build a theoretical model for the value of such reputation ...
Working Paper
Can Reputation Ensure Efficiency in the Structured Finance Market? Majority Voting: A Quantitative Investigation
In Elamin (2013), the credit rating agency (CRA) cannot credibly fully reveal its information about the quality of a rated structured finance project, when ratings are unverifiable. Can the fear of losing its reputation discipline the CRA? In this paper, there is incomplete information about the type of the CRA. With some probability, it can be a truthful type, always fully revealing its information. At every period, the (updated) probability that the CRA is of the truthful type is its reputation. With only two project types and when the CRA?s reputation is high enough, an informationally ...