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Corporate governance includes legal, contractual, and market mechanisms that structure decision-making within business corporations. Most attention has focused on corporate governance in large U.S. public corporations with dispersed shareholding. The separation of ownership from control in those corporations creates a unique problem, as shareholders typically have weak individual incentive to monitor managers. Mechanisms that have been developed to address this agency problem include independent directors, fiduciary duty, securities law disclosure, executive compensation, various professional gatekeepers, the market for corporate control, and shareholder activism. In most countries outside the United States, there are few companies with dispersed shareholding. Instead, most companies have a controlling shareholder or group. These companies face a different agency problem, the possibility that controlling shareholders may use their power to gain at the expense of minority shareholders. Enterprise governance refers to mechanisms aimed at related agency problems that occur in closely held companies without publicly traded equity interests. Here too the agency problem typically encountered is the potential conflict between controllers and minority investors, with the added twist that share illiquidity removes an important protection for the minority. Closely held companies have adopted a variety of contractual mechanisms to address these concerns. Other than the important but special cases of venture capital and private equity fund investments, there is less empirical evidence on governance in closely held companies because information is generally much harder to find.

Hedge fund activism refers to the phenomenon where hedge fund investors acquire a strict minority block of shares in a target firm and then attempt to pressure management for changes in corporate policies and governance with the aim to improve firm performance. This study provides an updated empirical analysis as well as a comprehensive survey of the academic finance research on hedge fund activism. Beginning in the early 1990s, shareholder engagement by activist hedge funds has evolved to become both an investment strategy and a remedy for poor corporate governance. Hedge funds represent a group of highly incentivized, value-driven investors who are relatively free from regulatory and structural barriers that have constrained the monitoring by other external investors. While traditional institutional investors have taken actions ex-post to preserve value or contain observed damage (such as taking the “Wall Street Walk”), hedge fund activists target underperforming firms in order to unlock value and profit from the improvement. Activist hedge funds also differ from corporate raiders that operated in the 1980s, as they tend to accumulate minority equity stakes and do not seek direct control. As a result, activists must win support from fellow shareholders via persuasion and influence, representing a hybrid internal-external role in a middle-ground form of corporate governance. Research on hedge fund activism centers on how it impacts the target company, its shareholders, other stakeholders, and the capital market as a whole. Opponents of hedge fund activism argue that activists focus narrowly on short-term financial performance, and such “short-termism” may be detrimental to the long-run value of target companies. The empirical evidence, however, supports the conclusion that interventions by activist hedge funds lead to improvements in target firms, on average, in terms of both short-term metrics, such as stock value appreciation, and long-term performance, including productivity, innovation, and governance. Overall, the evidence from the full body of the literature generally supports the view that hedge fund activism constitutes an important venue of corporate governance that is both influence-based and market-driven, placing activist hedge funds in a unique position to reduce the agency costs associated with the separation of ownership and control.

One of the fastest-growing areas of finance research is the study of managerial biases and their implications for firm outcomes. Since the mid-2000s, this strand of behavioral corporate finance has provided theoretical and empirical evidence on the influence of biases in the corporate realm, such as overconfidence, experience effects, and the sunk-cost fallacy. The field has been a leading force in dismantling the argument that traditional economic mechanisms—selection, learning, and market discipline—would suffice to uphold the rational-manager paradigm. Instead, the evidence reveals that behavioral forces exert a significant influence at every stage of a chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) career. First, at the appointment stage, selection does not impede the promotion of behavioral managers. Instead, competitive environments oftentimes promote their advancement, even under value-maximizing selection mechanisms. Second, while at the helm of the company, learning opportunities are limited, since many managerial decisions occur at low frequency, and their causal effects are clouded by self-attribution bias and difficult to disentangle from those of concurrent events. Third, at the dismissal stage, market discipline does not ensure the firing of biased decision-makers as board members themselves are subject to biases in their evaluation of CEOs. By documenting how biases affect even the most educated and influential decision-makers, such as CEOs, the field has generated important insights into the hard-wiring of biases. Biases do not simply stem from a lack of education, nor are they restricted to low-ability agents. Instead, biases are significant elements of human decision-making at the highest levels of organizations. An important question for future research is how to limit, in each CEO career phase, the adverse effects of managerial biases. Potential approaches include refining selection mechanisms, designing and implementing corporate repairs, and reshaping corporate governance to account not only for incentive misalignments, but also for biased decision-making.

Despite the aggregate value of M&A market transactions amounting to several trillions dollars on an annual basis, acquiring firms often underperform relative to non-acquiring firms, especially in public takeovers. Although hundreds of academic studies have investigated the deal- and firm-level factors associated with M&A announcement returns, many factors that increase M&A performance in the short run fail to relate to sustained long-run returns. In order to understand value creation in M&As, it is key to identify the firm and deal characteristics that can reliably predict long-run performance. Broadly speaking, long-run underperformance in M&A deals results from poor acquirer governance (reflected by CEO overconfidence and a lack of (institutional) shareholder monitoring) as well as from poor merger execution and integration (as captured by the degree of acquirer-target relatedness in the post-merger integration process). Although many more dimensions affect immediate deal transaction success, their effect on long-run performance is non-existent, or mixed at best.

Law and economics has proved a particularly fruitful scholarly approach in the field of mergers and acquisitions. A huge law and economics literature has developed, providing critical insights into merger activity in general and the proper role of corporate and securities law in regulating this activity. Early economic research examined the motivations for merger activity and the antitrust implications of mergers. Later scholarship elucidated the important disciplining effects on management from merger activity and the market for corporate control. If management performs poorly, causing a firm to become undervalued relative to a well-managed firm, the firm becomes vulnerable to a takeover where management will be replaced. This prospect provides a powerful incentive for management to perform well. More recent work has revealed the limitations of market discipline on management actions in the merger context, and the corresponding role of corporate law in protecting stockholders. Because a merger is generally the final interaction between management and the other stakeholders in a firm, the typical constraints and mechanisms of accountability that otherwise constrain managerial opportunism may be rendered ineffective. This work has played a central role in informing modern jurisprudence. It has shaped the application of enhanced judicial scrutiny of management actions in the merger context, as embodied in the landmark Delaware cases Unocal and Revlon. The law and economics literature has also made important contribution to more recent developments in stockholder appraisal. The law and economics tradition has also provided a useful framework for evaluating the dynamics of merger litigation, including stockholder appraisal, and the extent to which such litigation can be made to serve a useful role in corporate governance.

Passively managed (index) funds have grown to become among the largest shareholders in many publicly traded companies. Their large ownership stakes and voting power have attracted the attention of market participants, academics, and regulators and have sparked an active debate about their corporate governance role. While many studies explore the governance implications of passive fund growth, they often come to conflicting conclusions. To understand how the growth in indexing can affect governance, it is important to understand fund managers’ incentives to be engaged shareholders. These incentives depend on fund managers’ compensation contracts, ownership stakes, assets under management, and costs of engagement. Major passive asset managers, such as the Big Three (BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard), may have incentives to be engaged even though they track the indices and their engagement efforts benefit all other funds that track the same indices. This is because such funds’ substantial ownership stakes in multiple firms can both increase the effectiveness of their engagement and create relatively large financial benefits from engagement despite the low fees they collect. However, there is a difference between large and small index fund families: the incentives of the latter are likely to be substantially smaller, and the empirical evidence appears to be consistent with this distinction. The governance effects of passive fund growth also depend on where flows to passive funds come from, which investors are replaced by passive funds in firms’ ownership structures, how passive funds interact with other shareholders, and how their growth affects other asset managers’ compensation structures. Considering such aggregate effects and interactions can help reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings in the empirical literature. It also suggests that policymakers should be careful in using the existing studies to understand the aggregate governance effects of passive fund growth over the past decades. Overall, the literature has made important progress in understanding and quantifying passive funds’ incentives to engage, their monitoring activities and voting practices, and their interactions with other shareholders. Based on the findings in the literature, there is yet no clear answer to whether passive fund growth has been beneficial or detrimental for governance, and there are many open questions remaining. These open questions suggest several important directions for future research in this area.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the incorporation of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into corporate management, financial decision-making, and investors’ portfolio decisions. Socially responsible firms are expected to internalize the externalities they create (e.g., pollution) and be accountable to shareholders and other stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, etc.). Rating agencies have developed firm-level measures of ESG performance that are widely used in the literature. However, these ratings show inconsistencies that result from the rating agencies’ preferences, weights of the constituting factors, and rating methodology. CSR also deals with sustainable, responsible, and impact investing. The return implications of investing in the stocks of socially responsible firms include the search for an EGS factor and the performance of SRI funds. SRI funds apply negative screening (exclusion of “sin” industries), positive screening, and activism through engagement or proxy voting. In this context, one wonders whether responsible investors are willing to trade off financial returns with a “moral” dividend (the return given up in exchange for an increase in utility driven by the knowledge that an investment is ethical). Related to the analysis of externalities and the ethical dimension of corporate decisions is the literature on green financing (the financing of environmentally friendly investment projects by means of green bonds) and on how to foster economic decarbonization as climate change affects financial markets and investor behavior.