IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/11507.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Wolf Pack Activism

Author

Listed:
  • Brav, Alon
  • Dasgupta, Amil
  • Mathews, Richmond

Abstract

Blockholder monitoring is key to corporate governance, but blockholders large enough to exercise significant unilateral influence are rare. Mechanisms that enable small blockholders to exert collective influence are therefore important. It is alleged that institutional blockholders sometimes implicitly coordinate their interventions, with one acting as "lead" activist and others as peripheral"wolf pack" members. We present a model of wolf pack activism. Our model formalizes a key source of complementarity across the engagement strategies of activists and highlights the catalytic role played by the leader. We also characterize share acquisition in pack formation, providing testable implications on ownership and price dynamics.

Suggested Citation

  • Brav, Alon & Dasgupta, Amil & Mathews, Richmond, 2016. "Wolf Pack Activism," CEPR Discussion Papers 11507, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11507
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=11507
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Morris, Stephen & Shin, Hyun Song, 1998. "Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling Currency Attacks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 587-597, June.
    2. Jongha Lim & Berk A. Sensoy & Michael S. Weisbach, 2016. "Indirect Incentives of Hedge Fund Managers," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 71(2), pages 871-918, April.
    3. Carlsson, Hans & van Damme, Eric, 1993. "Global Games and Equilibrium Selection," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(5), pages 989-1018, September.
    4. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1986. "Large Shareholders and Corporate Control," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 94(3), pages 461-488, June.
    5. Vicente Cuñat & Mireia Gine & Maria Guadalupe, 2012. "The Vote Is Cast: The Effect of Corporate Governance on Shareholder Value," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(5), pages 1943-1977, October.
    6. Edmans, Alex, 2011. "Short-term termination without deterring long-term investment: A theory of debt and buyouts," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(1), pages 81-101, October.
    7. April Klein & Emanuel Zur, 2009. "Entrepreneurial Shareholder Activism: Hedge Funds and Other Private Investors," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 64(1), pages 187-229, February.
    8. Sergey Kovbasyuk & Marco Pagano, 2022. "Advertising Arbitrage [Synchronization risk and delayed arbitrage]," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 26(4), pages 799-827.
    9. Jeffrey Zwiebel, 1995. "Block Investment and Partial Benefits of Corporate Control," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 62(2), pages 161-185.
    10. Brav, Alon & Jiang, Wei & Kim, Hyunseob, 2010. "Hedge Fund Activism: A Review," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 4(3), pages 185-246, March.
    11. Antoine Faure-Grimaud, 2004. "Public Trading and Private Incentives," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(4), pages 985-1014.
    12. JOSEPH A. McCAHERY & ZACHARIAS SAUTNER & LAURA T. STARKS, 2016. "Behind the Scenes: The Corporate Governance Preferences of Institutional Investors," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 71(6), pages 2905-2932, December.
    13. Chevalier, Judith & Ellison, Glenn, 1997. "Risk Taking by Mutual Funds as a Response to Incentives," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(6), pages 1167-1200, December.
    14. Dlugosz, Jennifer & Fahlenbrach, Rudiger & Gompers, Paul & Metrick, Andrew, 2006. "Large blocks of stock: Prevalence, size, and measurement," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 594-618, June.
    15. Anat R. Admati & Paul Pfleiderer, 2009. "The "Wall Street Walk" and Shareholder Activism: Exit as a Form of Voice," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(7), pages 2445-2485, July.
    16. Winton, Andrew, 1993. "Limitation of Liability and the Ownership Structure of the Firm," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(2), pages 487-512, June.
    17. Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez‐De‐Silanes & Andrei Shleifer, 1999. "Corporate Ownership Around the World," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(2), pages 471-517, April.
    18. Alon Brav & Wei Jiang & Frank Partnoy & Randall Thomas, 2008. "Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(4), pages 1729-1775, August.
    19. Franklin Allen, 2001. "Do Financial Institutions Matter?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(4), pages 1165-1175, August.
    20. Charles Kahn & Andrew Winton, 1998. "Ownership Structure, Speculation, and Shareholder Intervention," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(1), pages 99-129, February.
    21. Patrick Bolton & Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden, 1998. "Blocks, Liquidity, and Corporate Control," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(1), pages 1-25, February.
    22. Alex Edmans & Gustavo Manso, 2011. "Governance Through Trading and Intervention: A Theory of Multiple Blockholders," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(7), pages 2395-2428.
    23. repec:hrv:faseco:30747162 is not listed on IDEAS
    24. Mike Burkart & Denis Gromb & Fausto Panunzi, 1997. "Large Shareholders, Monitoring, and the Value of the Firm," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 112(3), pages 693-728.
    25. Albert S. Kyle & Jean-Luc Vila, 1991. "Noise Trading and Takeovers," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 22(1), pages 54-71, Spring.
    26. Dasgupta, Amil & Piacentino, Giorgia, 2015. "The Wall Street walk when blockholders compete for flows," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 63144, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    27. Clifford G. Holderness, 2009. "The Myth of Diffuse Ownership in the United States," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(4), pages 1377-1408, April.
    28. Amil Dasgupta & Giorgia Piacentino, 2015. "The Wall Street Walk when Blockholders Compete for Flows," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(6), pages 2853-2896, December.
    29. Ernst Maug, 1998. "Large Shareholders as Monitors: Is There a Trade-Off between Liquidity and Control?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(1), pages 65-98, February.
    30. Stuart L. Gillan & Laura T. Starks, 2007. "The Evolution of Shareholder Activism in the United States," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 19(1), pages 55-73, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marco Becht & Julian Franks & Jeremy Grant & Hannes F. Wagner, 2017. "Returns to Hedge Fund Activism: An International Study," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 30(9), pages 2933-2971.
    2. Johnson, Travis L. & Swem, Nathan, 2021. "Reputation and investor activism: A structural approach," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(1), pages 29-56.
    3. Bar-Isaac, Heski & Shapiro, Joel, 2020. "Blockholder voting," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(3), pages 695-717.
    4. Denes, Matthew R. & Karpoff, Jonathan M. & McWilliams, Victoria B., 2017. "Thirty years of shareholder activism: A survey of empirical research," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 405-424.
    5. Cvijanovic, Dragana & Dasgupta, Amil & Zachariadis, Konstantinos, 2019. "The Wall Street Stampede: Exit as Governance with Interacting Blockholders," CEPR Discussion Papers 13870, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    6. Travis L. Johnson & Nathan Swem, 2017. "Reputation and Investor Activism: A Structural Approach," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2017-036r1, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 15 Oct 2020.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Edmans, Alex & Holderness, Clifford, 2016. "Blockholders: A Survey of Theory and Evidence," CEPR Discussion Papers 11442, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Dasgupta, Amil & Fos, Vyacheslav & Sautner, Zacharias, 2021. "Institutional investors and corporate governance," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112114, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Alex Edmans, 2014. "Blockholders and Corporate Governance," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 23-50, December.
    4. Brav, Alon & Dasgupta, Amil & Mathews, Richmond D., 2022. "Wolf pack activism," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112118, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    5. Alex Edmans & Gustavo Manso, 2011. "Governance Through Trading and Intervention: A Theory of Multiple Blockholders," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(7), pages 2395-2428.
    6. Konijn, Sander J.J. & Kräussl, Roman & Lucas, Andre, 2011. "Blockholder dispersion and firm value," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(5), pages 1330-1339.
    7. Travis L. Johnson & Nathan Swem, 2017. "Reputation and Investor Activism: A Structural Approach," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2017-036r1, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 15 Oct 2020.
    8. Dasgupta, Amil & Piacentino, Giorgia, 2015. "The Wall Street walk when blockholders compete for flows," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 63144, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    9. Kerry Back & Pierre Collin‐Dufresne & Vyacheslav Fos & Tao Li & Alexander Ljungqvist, 2018. "Activism, Strategic Trading, and Liquidity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 86(4), pages 1431-1463, July.
    10. Khanna, Naveen & Mathews, Richmond D., 2012. "Doing battle with short sellers: The conflicted role of blockholders in bear raids," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(2), pages 229-246.
    11. Brav, Alon & Mathews, Richmond D., 2011. "Empty voting and the efficiency of corporate governance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 289-307, February.
    12. Craig W. Holden & Stacey Jacobsen & Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, 2014. "The Empirical Analysis of Liquidity," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 8(4), pages 263-365, December.
    13. Jing Huang & Steven R. Matsunaga & Z. Jay Wang, 2020. "The Role of Pension Business Benefits in Institutional Block Ownership and Corporate Governance," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 37(4), pages 1959-1989, December.
    14. Schmidt, Cornelius & Fahlenbrach, Rüdiger, 2017. "Do exogenous changes in passive institutional ownership affect corporate governance and firm value?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 285-306.
    15. Cvijanovic, Dragana & Dasgupta, Amil & Zachariadis, Konstantinos, 2019. "The Wall Street Stampede: Exit as Governance with Interacting Blockholders," CEPR Discussion Papers 13870, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Burkart, Mike & Lee, Samuel, 2018. "Activism and Takeovers," CEPR Discussion Papers 12616, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    17. Simon Döring & Wolfgang Drobetz & Sadok El Ghoul & Omrane Guedhami & Henning Schröder, 2021. "Institutional investment horizons and firm valuation around the world," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 52(2), pages 212-244, March.
    18. Fos, Vyacheslav & Kahn, Charles, 2019. "The Threat of Intervention," CEPR Discussion Papers 13654, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    19. Corum, Adrian Aycan, 2021. "Fighting Fire with Fire: Optimality of Value Destruction to Mitigate Short-Termism," OSF Preprints xhwmg, Center for Open Science.
    20. Stepanov, Sergey & Suvorov, Anton, 2017. "Agency problem and ownership structure: Outside blockholder as a signal," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 87-107.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance

    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:cpr:ceprdp:11507. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: . General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.