IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bon/boncrc/crctr224_2019_117.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Shareholder Activism in Germany

Author

Listed:
  • Andreas Engert

Abstract

Shareholder activism by hedge funds has taken hold in Germany in spite of large ownership concentration. This essay uses the example of Stada Arzneimittel AG to highlight features of activism, German style. It goes on to discuss the legal issues raised by activist campaigns at the two stages of acquiring a shareholding in the target company and, subsequently, of interacting with its management and pressuring for strategic or corporate governance changes. In light of the theory and evidence on the short-term and long-term effects of shareholder activism, the essay concludes that German and European law has rightly refrained from intervening in this most recent corporate governance development. The law lacks a reliable filter to sort desirable from undesirable forms of activism. The essay is forthcoming in Holger Fleischer, Hideki Kanda, Kon Sik Kim, and Peter O. Mülbert (eds.), German and East Asian Perspectives on Corporate and Capital Market Law: Investors versus Companies.

Suggested Citation

  • Andreas Engert, 2019. "Shareholder Activism in Germany," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2019_117, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2019_117
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp117
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    shareholder activism; hedge fund activism; major shareholdings disclosure; insider trading; company secrets;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
    • K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Business and Securities Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2019_117. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CRC Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.crctr224.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.