Title: Herding behaviour in shareholder activism brokers

Authors: Konstantinos Kostaris; Andreas Andrikopoulos

Addresses: Quantitative Methods Lab, University of the Aegean, 8 Michalon Str., 82100, Chios, Greece ' Department of Maritime Studies, University of Piraeus, 21 Grigoriou Lampraki Str., 18533, Piraeus, Greece

Abstract: This paper seeks to detect herding behaviour in public firms targeted by multiple shareholders through shareholder activism. We use beneficial ownership reports and social network analysis to depict the connections between shareholders and targets in a shareholder activism network. We concentrate on brokers and the 1% of target firms with the largest number of shareholder activists. In our model, brokers are nodes that connect shareholders and targets that are not directly connected. We find no evidence of herding behaviour in either brokers or the 1% of target firms. Our findings are important to regulators and investors affected by principal-agent conflicts in targeted firms.

Keywords: shareholder activism; activism networks; connections; target firms; public firms; brokers; herding behaviour; clustered activism; beneficial ownership reports.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBAAF.2022.126158

International Journal of Banking, Accounting and Finance, 2022 Vol.13 No.2, pp.261 - 276

Received: 05 Oct 2021
Accepted: 23 Mar 2022

Published online: 13 Oct 2022 *

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