Using a large hand-collected data set from 2001 to 2006, we find that activist hedge funds in the United States propose strategic, operational, and financial remedies and attain success or partial success in two-thirds of the cases. Hedge funds seldom seek control and in most cases are nonconfrontational. The abnormal return around the announcement of activism is approximately 7%, with no reversal during the subsequent year. Target firms experience increases in payout, operating performance, and higher CEO turnover after activism. Our analysis provides important new evidence on the mechanisms and effects of informed shareholder monitoring.ALTHOUGH HEDGE FUND ACTIVISM IS WIDELY discussed and fundamentally important, it remains poorly understood. Much of the commentary on hedge fund activism is based on supposition or anecdotal evidence. Critics and regulators question whether hedge fund activism benefits shareholders, while numerous commentators claim that hedge fund activists destroy value by distracting managers from long-term projects. However, there is a dearth of large-sample evidence about hedge fund activism, and existing samples are plagued by various biases. * We thank the Acting Editor who handled our submission. Brav is with Duke University, Jiang is with Columbia University, Partnoy is with University of San Diego, and Thomas is with Vanderbilt University. The authors have benefited from discussions with Patrick Bolton, Bill Bratton, Martijn Cremers, Gregory Dyra, Alex Edmans, Allen Ferrell, Gur Huberman, Joe Mason, Edward Rock, Mark Roe, Roberta Romano, Tano Santos, William Spitz, Robert Thompson, and Gregory van Inwegen and comments from seminar and conference participants at the American Law and Economics Association, Arizona State University, Association of American Law Schools, BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre Symposium, Chicago Quantitative Alliance, Columbia University, The Conference Board, Drexel University, Duke University, FDIC, University of Florida, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Interdisciplinary Center (Herzlyia, Israel), Inquire (UK), University of Kansas, London Business School, Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University, Society of Quantitative Analysts, University of Amsterdam, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, University of Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, Wharton, the European Financial Management Association annual meeting in Vienna, and the Vanderbilt Investor Activism Conference. We owe special thanks to a large number of research assistants for their help in data collection and, in particular, to Jennifer Blessing, Amod Gautam, Greg Klochkoff, and Samantha Prouty. We also thank George Murillo for excellent research assistance. Brav and Jiang acknowledge the financial support from the FDIC, the Q-Group, and the Yale/Oxford Shareholders and Corporate Governance Research Agenda. Jiang is also th...

The paper provides empirical evidence on the effect of strategic complementarities on investors' behavior in financial markets. We derive empirical implications from a global-game model and test them using data on mutual fund outflows. Consistent with the theory, we find that in funds with illiquid assets (where complementarities are stronger), outflows are more sensitive to bad past performance than in funds with liquid assets; we also find that investors' behavior depends on the composition of the shareholder base. We present further evidence that these results are not attributable to alternative explanations that are based on information conveyed by past performance or on clientele effects. Overall, our empirical findings suggest that strategic complementarities amplify the response of investors to fundamentals and generate financial fragility.

Using mutual fund redemptions as an instrument for price changes, we identify a strong effect of market prices on takeover activity (the "trigger effect"). An interquartile decrease in valuation leads to a seven percentage point increase in acquisition likelihood, relative to a 6% unconditional takeover probability. Instrumentation addresses the fact that prices are endogenous and increase in anticipation of a takeover (the "anticipation effect"). Our results overturn prior literature that finds a weak relation between prices and takeovers without instrumentation. These findings imply that financial markets have real effects: They impose discipline on managers by triggering takeover threats.DOES A LOW MARKET valuation make a firm a takeover target? In theory, if acquisition prices are related to market prices, acquirers can profit from taking over a firm whose market value is low relative to its peers-due either to mispricing or mismanagement-and restore it to its potential. Indeed, in practice, acquirers and other investors appear to track a firm's valuation multiples for indications on the potential for acquisition, and managers strive to maintain high market valuations to prevent a hostile takeover. Understanding whether such a link exists is important because, if so, this would suggest that the market is not a sideshow, but rather exerts a powerful disciplinary effect on firm management (as suggested by Marris (1964), Manne (1965), andJensen (1993)).Despite the above logic, existing empirical studies on takeovers fail to systematically uncover a meaningful relationship between market valuations * Edmans is from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, NBER, and ECGI. Goldstein is from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Jiang is from Columbia Business School. For helpful comments and discussions, we thank the Editor (Cam Harvey), two anonymous referees, an Associate Editor, Jack Bao, Thomas Bates, Jonathan Berk, Philip Bond, Jess Cornaggia, Todd Gormley, Dirk Hackbarth, Ayla Kayhan, Alexander Ljungqvist, Ernst Maug, Konrad Menzel, Randall Morck, Stew Myers, Lalitha Naveen, Gordon Phillips, Michael Roberts, Jacob Sagi, Jeremy Stein, and seminar participants at Columbia, Drexel, Georgia State, HBS, HEC Paris, HKUST, Houston, Mannheim, MIT Sloan, SUNY Binghamton, Temple, Tilburg, UNC, UT Dallas, Yale, AFA, Caesarea Center Conference, FIRS, LSE Paul Woolley Center Conference, NBER, the UBC Summer Conference, and the Washington University Conference on Corporate Finance. Robert Ready and Carrie Wu provided valuable research assistance. Edmans gratefully acknowledges the Goldman Sachs Research Fellowship from the Rodney White Center for Financial Research. This paper was previously circulated under the title "Takeover Activity and Target Valuations: Feedback Loops in Financial Markets." 934The Journal of Finance R and takeover probabilities. While Cremers, Nair, and John (2009) and Bates, Becher, and Lemmon (2008) find a negative (but economically insignificant) relation between takeover...

The wide range of 401(k) plans offered to employees has raised the question of whether there is such as thing as too much choice. The 401(k) participation rates among clients of the Vanguard Group were studied to verify the assumption that more choice is more desirable and intrinsically motivating. It was found that 401(k) plans that offered more funds had lower probability of employee participation.

Records of over half a million participants in more than 600 401(k) plans indicate that participants tend to allocate their contributions evenly across the funds they use, with the tendency weakening with the number of funds used. The number of funds used, typically between three and four, is not sensitive to the number of funds offered by the plans, which ranges from 4 to 59. A participant's propensity to allocate contributions to equity funds is not very sensitive to the fraction of equity funds among offered funds. The paper also comments on limitations on inferences from experiments and aggregate-level data analysis. Copyright 2006 by The American Finance Association.

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We test the empirical validity of a claim that has been playing a central role in debates on corporate governance -the claim that interventions by activist shareholders, and in particular activist hedge funds, have an adverse effect on the long-term interests of companies and their shareholders. While this "myopic activists" claim has been regularly invoked and has had considerable influence, its supporters have thus far failed to back it up with evidence. This paper presents a comprehensive empirical investigation of this claim and finds that it is not supported by the data.We study the universe of about 2,000 interventions by activist hedge funds during the period 1994-2007, examining a long time window of five years following the intervention. We find no evidence that interventions are followed by declines in operating performance in the long term; to the contrary, activist intervention are followed by improved operating performance during the five-year period following the intervention. These improvements in long-term performance, we find, are present also when focusing on the two subsets of activist interventions that are most resisted and criticized -first, interventions that lower or constrain long-term investments by enhancing leverage, beefing up shareholder payouts, or reducing investments and, second, adversarial interventions employing hostile tactics.We also find no evidence that the initial positive stock price spike accompanying activist interventions fails to appreciate their long-term costs and therefore tends to be followed by negative abnormal returns in the long term; the data is consistent with the initial spike reflecting correctly the intervention's long-term consequences. Similarly, we find no evidence for pumpand-dump patterns in which the exit of an activist is followed by abnormal long-term negative returns. Finally, we find no evidence for concerns that activist interventions during the years preceding the financial crisis rendered companies more vulnerable and that the targeted companies therefore were more adversely affected by the crisis.Our findings that the considered claims and concerns are not supported by the data have significant implications for ongoing policy debates on corporate governance, corporate law, and capital markets regulation. Policymakers and institutional investors should not accept the validity of the frequent assertions that activist interventions are costly to firms and their long-term shareholders in the long term; they should reject the use of such claims as a basis for limiting the rights and involvement of shareholders.