We examine the impact of geographic concentration of institutional investors on corporate governance and firm value. We find that firms whose large institutions are closely located to each other experience more shareholder-coordinated activities before Schedule 13D filings, more concerted proxy votes against management proposals, higher forced CEO turnover-performance sensitivity, higher returns around CEO turnover announcements and Schedule 13D filings, and larger increases in Tobin's q. These results are robust to using the introduction of new direct airline routes as an exogenous source of variation in proximity. Our results suggest that geographic concentration of investors increases monitoring effectiveness.

Using block share acquisitions made by private equity (PE) funds, we examine the sources of value gains in PE minority equity investments. We find that compared with non-PE acquirers, PE acquirers are more likely to place representatives with finance experience or those with experience in the target's industry on the target's board when the need for target oversight and/or advice is higher. The targets in PE acquisitions, particularly poorly performing targets, targets with high R&D intensity, and targets with PE-appointed directors who have experience in the target's industry, realize both higher announcement returns and better post-acquisition operating performance than do targets in non-PE acquisitions. These findings suggest that the governance and operational engineering that PE acquirers apply to their targets constitutes important sources of value creation in PE minority equity investments.

We examine how owner-managers incentives and firm-specific measures of corporate governance affect restructuring decisions during an economy-wide shock. Using a large sample of Korean firms that had experienced a severe financial crisis during 1997–1998, we find that the likelihood of restructuring is negatively related to the divergence of cash flow rights and control rights of controlling shareholders, and that the announcements of restructuring by chaebol firms with such divergence are greeted more negatively by investors. However, firm-specific measures of corporate governance such as total debt, bank loans, and equity ownership by unaffiliated financial institutions mitigate these negative effects, thereby influencing firms to choose value-maximizing restructuring policies. Our results suggest that the controlling shareholders' incentives to expropriate other investors are high during an economic shock. Our results also highlight the importance of corporate governance in mitigating such expropriation incentives, and provide important implications for the role of corporate governance during an economic shock, such as the 2007–2008 global financial crisis.

This paper examines the influence of corporate governance systems on insiders' ability to profit from their information advantage and the ways through which corporate governance systems influence such ability. We find that corporate governance significantly reduces the profitability of insider sales but not that of insider purchases. Given that sales involve greater legal risk than purchases, the results suggest that well-governed firms restrict informed insider trading mainly to reduce legal risk. We also find that better-governed firms reduce the profitability of insider sales by increasing the likelihood of adopting ex-ante preventive measures (e.g., voluntary insider trading restriction policies), implementing such measures more effectively, and taking ex-post disciplinary actions more actively. These results highlight how better-governed firms are able to restrict insiders from exploiting private information.