Are Estimates of the Impact of Shareholder Activism Published Selectively?

Josef Bajzik, Tomas Havranek, Zuzana Irsova and Jiri Novak

No 2023/1, Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies

Abstract: Shareholder activism constitutes an increasingly prominent feature of corporate governance landscape. There is a controversy in prior research over whether and how much value activism creates. We examine whether estimates of the impact of shareholder activism are published selectively in prior empirical research. We argue that economists may tend to view activism as a vital corporate governance tool to overcome agency problems and promote economic efficiency. Researchers and journal editors may thus be biased towards consider empirical results in support of the beneficial role of shareholder activism as more reliable than insignificant or opposite results. Consistent with this prediction we document a substantial bias towards publishing (i) higher (rather than lower) and (ii) statistically significant (rather than insignificant) estimates of the impact of shareholder activism. Due to that the pool of estimates in prior empirical literature is biased upwards. The value created by the various forms of shareholder activism corrected for these biases ranges from 0.38 to 3.23% with a median value of 1.94%.

Keywords: cumulative abnormal return; shareholder activism; eventstudy; meta-analysis; model averaging; publication bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 G30 G34 L20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2023-01, Revised 2023-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/en/veda-vyzkum/working-papers/6725 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2023_01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers IES from Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Natalie Svarcova ().