People

Are environmental and social (ES) funds really voting in support of their claims? Each year, asset managers vote on various proposals from the companies in their investment portfolio on behalf of fund investors, who expect strong support for ES initiatives from these companies. However, in a recent research conducted by the author, Prof. Roni Michaely, along with Prof. Guillem Calafi-Ordonez, and Prof. Silvina Rubio, a surprising pattern has been identified. These ES funds often support proposals that are expected to pass or fail easily. However, when it comes to close votes—where their decision really matters—they tend to vote against these proposals.

Are environmental and social (ES) funds really voting in support of their claims? Each year, asset managers vote on various proposals from the companies in their investment portfolio on behalf of fund investors, who expect strong support for ES initiatives from these companies. However, in a recent research conducted by the author, Prof. Roni Michaely, along with Prof. Guillem Calafi-Ordonez, and Prof. Silvina Rubio, a surprising pattern has been identified. These ES funds often support proposals that are expected to pass or fail easily. However, when it comes to close votes—where their decision really matters—they tend to vote against these proposals.

Washington policy research analysts (WAs) monitor political developments and produce research to interpret the impact of these events. We find institutional clients channel more commissions to brokerages providing policy research and commission-allocating institutional clients generate superior returns on their politically sensitive trades. We find that WA policy research reports are associated with significant price and volume reactions. Finally, we find sell-side analysts with access to WA issue superior stock recommendations on politically sensitive stocks. These effects are particularly acute during periods of high political uncertainty. Overall, we uncover a unique and an important conduit through which political information filters into asset prices.

WSJ talked about the current trend of corporate dictatorships, where companies are run by founder-chief executives who hold on to special voting shares or run boards as their own personal fief. The article highlights a study by Prof. Roni Michaely of the University of Hong Kong, Hyunseob Kim of the Chicago Federal Reserve, and Doron Levit of University of Washington, which found that the benefits of a benign corporate dictatorship wane over time. The research, which examined 920 companies with both voting and non-voting shares, revealed an intriguing pattern. During the initial years following an IPO, companies with founder control tended to perform on par with their more democratically governed counterparts. However, after a decade or so, a significant premium emerged for shares with full voting rights. The article argues that granting full voting rights to all stakeholders is still the best form of governance for companies in the long run.

This study investigates whether investors can reap economic benefits from analyzing differences in analyst quality. Although high-quality analysts’ average forecast is more accurate than the consensus forecast for firms with a large analyst following, the benefits of using high-quality analysts’ average forecasts are not economically significant. In contrast, the value of analyst quality differentiation exists in the second moment of forecasts. High-quality analysts’ forecast dispersion gives investors an advantage in dealing with uncertainty by predicting return volatility and providing opportunities for economically significant returns using option straddle and post-earnings announcement drift investment strategies.

Using micro-level data, we examine the behavior of socially responsible investment (SRI) funds. SRI funds select firms with lower pollution, more board diversity, higher employee satisfaction, and better workplace safety. Yet, both in the cross-section and using an exogenous shock to SRI capital, we find that SRI funds do not significantly change firm behavior. Moreover, we find little evidence that they try to impact firm behavior using shareholder proposals. Our results suggest that SRI funds are not greenwashing, but they are impact washing; they invest in a portfolio of firms with better environmental and social conduct but do not follow through on their promise of impact.

Prof Michaely presented a paper utilizing a unique dataset comprising nearly one million voting rationales provided by investors. The research findings shed light on the motivations behind institutional investors’ voting decisions and their impact on corporate governance practices.

Imagine you’re a successful executive at a large IT company. You’re in charge of security. Your decade-old firm is well established, selling complex, popular IT solutions to large corporations and government bodies. It’s an ordinary Saturday morning, you’re having your coffee and your phone rings. The caller informs you that your company has been subject to a massive cyberattack. Your company’s systems are compromised, and, worse, so are those of your customers. It’s your “nightmare moment”.

Based on textual analysis and a comparison of cybersecurity risk disclosures of firms that were hacked to others that were not, we propose a novel firm-level measure of cybersecurity risk for all U.S.-listed firms. We then examine whether cybersecurity risk is priced in the cross-section of stock returns. Portfolios of firms with high exposure to cybersecurity risk outperform other firms, on average, by up to 8.3% per year. Yet, high-exposure firms perform poorly in periods of high cybersecurity risk. Reassuringly, the measure is higher in information-technology industries, correlates with characteristics linked to firms hit by cyberattacks, and predicts future cyberattacks.