Governing Corporations with Concentrated Ownership Structure: An Empirical Analysis of Hedge Fund Activism in Italy and Germany, and Its Evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Against all odds, hedge fund activism occurs also in companies with concentrated ownership structure where the ultimate threat of a take-over has little chance to raise any concern among controlling shareholders. After summarizing the U.S. literature on the subject, this Article provides an in-depth description of hedge fund activism in Italy, and the plausible explanations for it based on the analysis of hand-collected data. The results are further tested through a comparison with hedge fund activism in Germany based on both legal and empirical analysis. While concluding that what apparently looks to be pure activism may in fact hide some form of relational investing to the benefit of hedge funds only, the Article also discusses the rationale and functioning of minimum board representation for minority shareholders through slate voting – a uniquely distinctive feature of the Italian corporate governance system that turns out to be a key-factor in future shareholder activism with the unprecedented increasing engagement of institutional investors. This article builds on an earlier and shorter paper - Governing Corporations with Concentrated Ownership Structure: Can Hedge Fund Activism Play Any Role in Italy? - which was presented at the 2009 Annual Conferences of the Canadian Law and Economics Association, University of Toronto, October 2-3, 2009, and of the Italian Society for Law and Economics, Universita degli Studi di Firenze, December 4-5, 2009. This earlier paper is available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1397562.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".