The following post comes to us from Jarrad Harford, Professor of Finance at the University of Washington; Ambrus Kecskés of the Schulich School of Business at York University; and Sattar Mansi, Professor of Finance at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University.
It is well established that managers of publicly traded firms, left to their own devices, tend to maximize their private benefits of control rather than the value of their shareholders’ stake in the firm. At the same time, imperfectly informed market participants can lead managers to make myopic investment decisions. One of the most important mechanisms that have been proposed to counter this mismanagement problem is longer investor horizons. By spreading both the costs and benefits of ownership over a long period of time, long-term investors can be very effective at monitoring corporate managers.
We explore this subject in our paper entitled Do Long-Term Investors Improve Corporate Decision Making? which was recently made publicly available on SSRN. We ask two questions. First, do long-term investors in publicly traded firms improve corporate behavior? Second, does their influence on managerial decision making improve returns to shareholders of the firm? To answer these questions, we study a wide swath of corporate behaviors.