We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity (stock turnover) and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive (i.e., they have a strong ex ante ESG profile). Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns (with four-factor adjustment and relative to a matched sample of non-engaged firms) of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together.
This paper examines what determines the correlation between prices and turnover in European housing markets. Using a panel vector autoregressive model, we find that there is a particularly strong feedback mechanism between prices and turnover. Momentum effects are another important reason why prices and turnover are correlated. Common underlying factors, such as GDP and interest rates, also explain part of the price-turnover correlation. The results in this paper imply that, to understand price and turnover dynamics, it is important to model prices and turnover as two interdependent processes. There is a considerable bias in the coefficient estimates of standard house price models if this dependency is not explicitly taken into account. 相似文献
This article measures the perception of Malaysian food manufacturers toward halal logistics through an industry survey conducted in Malaysia. Based on a survey with 44 food manufacturers in Malaysia, results indicate that the responsibility of halal logistics according to the manufacturer is a shared responsibility in the halal food supply chain and value chain. Second, the study confirms that a dedicated storage and transportation is required. The manufacturer recognizes that for cold chain products a dedicated halal sea/airport complex is required, whereas for ambient products, no mixing of halal and nonhalal products in the same section is sufficient. The manufacturer thinks that no mixing of halal and nonhalal products in the same zone of the supermarket provides sufficient assurance for the Muslim consumer. Third, 52.3% of the manufacturers are willing to pay more for a halal logistics system, whereas small and large companies show a higher willingness to pay than medium-size companies. Halal logistics is an important component of the manufacturer's halal promise but will require pressure from the government through regulations to make halal logistics a requirement for halal certification of food manufacturers. 相似文献
The focus of this study is on the fit between the item content of scales measuring humorous coping and basic concepts of stress and coping theory. To investigate this fit 81 items from seven currently available humorous coping scales have been subjected to a facet analysis, using the tool of a mapping sentence. Three facets derived from stress and coping theory were part of this mapping sentence: external demands, humorous responses and coping aims. Because of the claim that humorous coping may be related to physical health dimensions, special attention has been paid to two health-related coping aims: cognitive reappraisal and response-focused coping responses. Five raters categorized the facets and their respective categories. Some humorous coping scales showed an underrepresentation of “external demands” and “humorous responses” and only a few scales covered the “aims” facet adequately. Reliability and agreement parameters varied considerably among scales, both on facet level and on category level. The Waterloo University Humor Inventory (WUHI) was a positive exception to this pattern. Findings are discussed in the light of specific characteristics of the scales included. Possible improvements of humorous coping measurement in health-related research are proposed, as well as adaptations to the rating procedures. 相似文献
We investigate the relation between the CEO Pay Slice (CPS)—the fraction of the aggregate compensation of the top-five executive team captured by the Chief Executive Officer—and the value, performance, and behavior of public firms. The CPS could reflect the relative importance of the CEO as well as the extent to which the CEO is able to extracts rents. We find that, controlling for all standard controls, CPS is negatively associated with firm value as measured by industry-adjusted Tobin's q. CPS also has a rich set of relations with firms' behavior and performance. In particular, CPS is correlated with lower (industry-adjusted) accounting profitability, lower stock returns accompanying acquisitions announced by the firm and higher likelihood of a negative stock return accompanying such announcements, higher odds of the CEO receiving a lucky option grant at the lowest price of the month, lower performance sensitivity of CEO turnover, and lower stock market returns accompanying the filing of proxy statements for periods when CPS increases. Taken together, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that higher CPS is associated with agency problems and indicate that CPS can provide a useful tool for studying the performance and behavior of firms. 相似文献
In this paper we consider the problem of pricing a perpetual American put option in an exponential regime-switching Lévy model.
For the case of the (dense) class of phase-type jumps and finitely many regimes we derive an explicit expression for the value
function. The solution of the corresponding first-passage problem under a state-dependent level rests on a path transformation
and a new matrix Wiener–Hopf factorization result for this class of processes.
Research supported by the Nuffield Foundation, grant NAL/00761/G, and EPSRC grant EP/D039053/1. 相似文献
A generalization is presented of the existence results for an optimal consumption problem of Aumann and Perles [4] and Cox
and Huang [10]. In addition, we present a very general optimality principle.
Received: July 14, 1999; revised version: September 9, 1999 相似文献
This paper revisits the ongoing discussion on the importance of agglomeration externalities – specifically specialization, diversity and competition effects – that may contribute to innovation, productivity and urban employment growth. Previous meta‐analyses suggested that the evidence on agglomeration externalities is strongly context‐specific. Expanding an earlier analysis of 31 articles, we seek to draw in this paper more robust conclusions by means of the statistical evidence for agglomeration externalities presented in 73 scientific articles, all building on the seminal work of Glaeser et al. (1992). Our results confirm that the heterogeneity among studies is huge and can only be partially accounted for by means of an ordered probit analysis. Additionally, some evidence of publication bias is found. We conclude that the conventional lines of inquiry in this literature may now have reached strongly diminishing returns. New lines of inquiry, using rich micro‐level data on firms and workers, dynamic general equilibrium models at the macro level, more attention for spatial and temporal variation in the impacts of agglomeration, and further investigations into the spatial scope of externalities are promising avenues for further research that can enhance our understanding of how agglomeration externalities continue to fuel our increasingly urbanized world. 相似文献
The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing states under neoliberal restructuring programmes in the shadow of consumption dreams. Although religious actors and ideologies unquestionably form part of urban groups that are denied access to public and private means to wealth and security, the contributors to this symposium argue that within a global, comparative perspective, the entwinement of religion, state and market reveal more complicated configurations. Through a comparison of Islamic gated communities in Istanbul, Pentecostal prayer camps in Lagos and Pentecostal grassroots movements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this symposium demonstrates that urban religion should also be regarded as a constitutive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins. 相似文献
Previous studies have discouraged the use of the Cox proportional hazards (PH) model for traditional mediation analysis as it might provide biased results. Accelerated failure time (AFT) models have been proposed as an alternative for Cox PH models. In addition, the use of the potential outcomes framework has been proposed for mediation models with time-to-event outcomes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the performance of traditional mediation analysis and potential outcomes mediation analysis based on both the Cox PH and the AFT model. This is done by means of a Monte Carlo simulation study and the illustration of the methods using an empirical data set. Both the product-of-coefficients method of the traditional mediation analysis and the potential outcomes framework yield unbiased estimates with respect to their own underlying indirect effect value for simple mediation models with a time-to-event outcome and estimated based on Cox PH or AFT. 相似文献