I compare the timing of information acquisition among institutional investors and sell-side analysts. I find that hedge funds are unique: they anticipate analyst reports, and then reverse their positions after analysts publish reports. These trends are strongest for hedge funds and analysts most closely geographically situated. I also find that hedge funds generate their highest risk-adjusted returns among stocks with high analyst coverage. These results indicate that hedge funds are faster relative to analysts and other investors, and suggest that analysts assist hedge funds in exploiting their information acquisition advantages.

We measure the impact of reputation for proxy fighting on investor activism by estimating a dynamic model in which activists engage a sequence of target firms. Our estimation produces an evolving reputation measure for each activist and quantifies its impact on campaign frequency and outcomes. We find that high reputation activists initiate 3.5 times as many campaigns and extract 85% more settlements from targets, and that reputation-building incentives explain 20% of campaign initiations and 19% of proxy fights. Our estimates indicate these reputation effects combine to nearly double the value that activism adds for target shareholders.

We investigate how access to capital relates to the firms' investment decisions and project characteristics. We use project-level hydraulic fracturing (fracking) data from the energy industry to show that privately held firms more intensely invest in newer, non-proven areas while publicly-traded firms tilt investment toward well-established, proven areas. Furthermore, we find that exogenous improvements in private firms' access to finance decrease the investment wedge between private and public firms. Our results suggest that private firms minimize their financial disadvantages by targeting investment opportunities that have greater uncertainty.