City Research Online

Abstract

For decades, corporate managers have criticised analysts, fund managers, hedge fund managers and private equity professionals for telling them how to run their business, wihout having had the necessary experience. Now hedge fund activists are regularly suggesting operational decisions, and in some cases even in areas traditionally reserved for management. ‘Activism has gone from being frowned upon, something that marks you out as a rogue or maverick, to almost socially responsible.’1 These hedge funds may have become an accepted part of the governance universe but are they actually adding value?

Recent studies have answered this question in the affirmative, but what if those companies picked out by hedge funds for their attention were already on their way to outperformance? The observed outperformance may not be due to a hedge fund’s ability to contribute to value creation but a mere reflection of their stock picking abilities. The difficulty is in identifying those companies that would have made typical hedge fund targets but which were not actually targeted, i.e. build an appropriate group of comparable companies. We have developed a statistical model to identify just these companies.

Publication Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Additional Information:	Copyright Cass Business School.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HG Finance
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Finance

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