Shareholder Activists and Frictions in the CEO Labor Market

I am grateful to Daniel J. Taylor (editor), two anonymous referees, Renée Adams, Hami Amiraslani, Ionela Andreicovici, Lucian Bebchuk, Daniel Bens, Sara Bormann, Thomas Bourveau, Alon Brav, Gavin Cassar, Frank Ecker, Michael Erkens, Rainer Haselmann, Paul Healy, Katharina Hombach, Sharon Katz, Stephan Kramer, Chiara Lacava, Laurence van Lent, Edith Leung, Christian Leuz, Anya Nakhmurina, Vincenzo Pezone, Jochen Pierk, Anna Rohlfing-Bastian, Thomas Steffen, Tobias Tröger, Charles Wang, Simone Wies, David Windisch, Chloe Xie, Frank Zhang, and workshop participants at the Early Insights in Accounting Webinar, the 2019 European Accounting Association Annual Congress, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Goethe University, Harvard University, INSEAD, Yale University, the 2019 Tilburg Winter Camp, and Erasmus University Rotterdam for helpful comments and suggestions. I am grateful to Alon Brav for sharing data on hedge fund activism campaigns. Seung Hwan Bang, Alina Pugacheva, Qingrong Ruan, and Tiancheng Wang provided excellent research assistance. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Emergence program at Sorbonne University. The paper has benefited significantly from a fellow visit of Thomas Keusch to the Center for Advanced Studies Foundations of Law and Finance funded by German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)) Project FOR 2774.

Thomas Keusch, INSEAD, Department of Accounting and Control, Fontainebleau, France.

Editor’s note: Accepted by Daniel J. Taylor, under the Senior Editorship of W. Robert Knechel.