The influence of institutional investors on firm value

Abstract

The impact of corporate governance on firm value has been extensively debated by academics and business practitioners. Some studies show that companies that allow minority shareholders to have more control are likely to create greater shareholder value than those firms with concentrated control, while other studies suggest that the impact of having democratic governance is either negligible or even negative. In developed countries institutional investors have a significant stake in most of the companies. Active engagement by institutional investors is expected to decrease agency costs by strengthening monitoring mechanisms of operations and performance evaluations of the management, resulting in an increase in firm value. However, some academics and business practitioners argue that such minority shareholders' active engagement could be detrimental to firm value. In this thesis, I study the influence of institutional investors' active shareholder engagement on firm value and the relationship between the characteristics of corporate governance and firm value of target companies. I review previous studies that have evaluated both the effect of corporate governance and of institutional investors' activism on firm value. I conduct empirical analyses to examine the relationship between the institutions' shareholder engagement and firm value.