I use a sample of closed-end funds to examine how takeover defenses impact shareholder value and promote managerial entrenchment. These funds use the same defenses as general corporations but provide an ideal, homogeneous environment for testing their effects. Defenses are associated with lower fund market values, weaker reactions to activist 13D filings, and higher compensation levels for both fund managers and directors. This study provides greater clarity on the unresolved impact of takeover defenses on firm value, while showing for the first time that directors, who are responsible for adopting takeover defenses, financially benefit from their use.

We show that short interest is arguably the strongest known predictor of aggregate stock returns. It outperforms a host of popular return predictors both in and out of sample, with annual R2 statistics of 12.89% and 13.24%, respectively. In addition, short interest can generate utility gains of over 300 basis points per annum for a mean-variance investor. A vector autoregression decomposition shows that the economic source of short interest’s predictive power stems predominantly from a cash flow channel. Overall, our evidence indicates that short sellers are informed traders who are able to anticipate future aggregate cash flows and associated market returns.