Activist shareholders have an incentive to communicate and cooperate with other major shareholders. However, the impact of their activity on information flow surrounding targeted firms is largely unknown. We explore this aspect using a prolific proponent: labor unions. Following the mailing of proxies containing union-sponsored shareholder proposals, trading volume increases significantly and at-issue bond yield spreads of targeted firms are lower compared to matched firms. Subsequent difference-in-differences analyses show that stock prices of targeted firms become more informative as a result of activism, affirming the intuition that activism results in a reduction of differential information between outside investors.

We examine the performance of liquidity proxies in commodities. The Amihud measure has the largest correlation with liquidity benchmarks. Amivest and Effective Tick measures also perform well. These proxies are useful for studies of commodity liquidity over a long time period and those that lack access to high-frequency data. We use various aspects of transaction costs, such as spread, depth, immediacy, and resiliency, to give insight into the costs of different execution approaches. Transaction costs increase with volatility and exhibit mean reversion. Splitting trades over one hour can reduce trading costs by two-thirds compared to an immediate execution.