RCFS News

Investors increasingly rely on proxy advisors such as ISS in deciding how to vote in corporate elections. In the paper “Information Bias in the Proxy Advisory Market,” Shichao Ma and Yan Xiong construct a theoretical model to examine the biases that can arise when the proxy advisor is a profit-maximizer. An intuitive finding is that a conflicted proxy advisor provides biased recommendations. More interestingly, if shareholders have either distorted preferences… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Information Bias in the Proxy Advisory Market

            There is widespread recognition among policymakers and regulators that bank behavior, especially risk-taking, is influenced by the type of compensation paid to bank executives. Academic literature, however, is still grappling with this question, and it is not unfair to say that there is a dearth of evidence even about basic facts about how executive compensation has changed after the 2008 financial crisis as new… Read More »Paper Spotlight: How are Bankers Paid?

The 10th MoFiR Workshop on Banking is now accepting submissions. Please see the Call for Papers. The workshop, which features a dual submission option with RCFS, will take place virtually June 21-22, 2021. The RCFS sponsoring editor is Andrew Ellul. The submission deadline is 6pm (GMT), Sunday March 21, 2021.

Differences in their objective functions lead to possible conflicts of interests between various stakeholders of firms; e.g., between shareholders and employees. These conflicts are more likely to manifest when firms face important investment or governance decisions, specifically, at times of mergers and acquisitions. How does the power of a firm’s labor force affect its exposure and gains in takeovers? In a forthcoming RCFS paper, “Hard Marriage with Heavy Burdens: Organized… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Hard Marriage with Heavy Burdens: Organized Labor as Takeover Deterrents

The dual submission decisions for the 2021 RCFS Winter Conference have been sent. If you submitted your paper as a dual submission and did not receive your decision email, please contact us.

The relationship between hedge fund activists and institutional shareholders in firms targeted by activists could be fraught with conflicting interests, making it a very important question to explore. In the paper “Institutional Investors and Hedge Fund Activism,” Simi Kedia, Laura Starks, and Xianjue Wang study how differences among institutional investors impact their willingness to support hedge fund activists, the impact on the campaign’s success, and potential value created from hedge… Read More »Paper Spotlight: Institutional Investors and Hedge Fund Activism