Databases are important but expensive sources for financial research. We examine data sources from 14,087 articles published in finance journals, identify the most common databases and how it impacts visibility. We find that 74% of empirical papers rely on at least one common database. The choice of data is skewed towards a couple of heavily used products, even when there are alternatives. This tendency is stronger for articles published in top-5 journals and research from the US and top business schools. Finding that the most common databases results in more citations suggests that data access enhances scrutiny and facilitates research clusters.

This chapter reviews the growing empirical literature on shareholder activism by hedge funds. The aim is a comparative approach contrasting the impact of hedge fund activism on target firms with outcomes for other types of activist investors. Following recent research, the chapter provides an empirical analysis based on the disclosure of equity blockholdings by activist investors in a large sample of all US listed companies. In addition, it summarizes which types of investors engage in other events linked to activism, such as takeovers, proxy contests, or shareholder proposals. Overall, there is evidence that not only hedge funds but also other types of investors can be effective monitors, but there are nuanced differences with respect to targeting decisions and payout policies.

We disentangle asset-specific, market, and funding liquidity in the CDS–bond basis outside and during the 2007–9 global financial crisis. Our findings stress the importance of separating different types of liquidity, since all three measures have independently negative impacts on the basis. Funding liquidity emerges as the economically most important liquidity metric. While asset-specific liquidity is cross-correlated in both the cash and derivative markets, funding and market liquidity only matter for the cash market. We exploit the decomposition of the basis to test predictions of limits-to-arbitrage theories. We find strong evidence in favor of margin-based asset pricing and flight-to-quality effects.

We conduct a large-sample analysis of investor activism in the US based on all 13D filings from 2001 to 2016. While hedge funds represent the largest filer group, the sample contains a diverse set of other activist shareholders. This raises the question to what extent other investors perform a governance role similar to hedge funds. Based on target firms' outcome variables, like announcement returns of activist campaigns and changes in operating performance measures, we find surprisingly few differences. However, hedge funds play a special role when it comes towards takeovers. They stimulate monitoring activities among relatively larger firms and they help to set payout policies.

The first Greek bailout on April 11, 2010 triggered a significant reevaluation of sovereign credit risk across Europe. We exploit this event to examine the transmission of sovereign to corporate credit risk. A 10% increase in sovereign credit risk raises corporate credit risk on average by 1.1% after the bailout. The evidence is suggestive of risk spillovers from sovereign to corporate credit risk through a financial and a fiscal channel, as the effects are more pronounced for firms that are bank or government dependent. We find no support for indirect risk transmission through a deterioration of macroeconomic fundamentals.

I provide new evidence of the S&P500 inclusion effect that highlights the importance of stock supply. If excess demand from S&P500-linked capital drives the inclusion effect, it should depend as well on the effective supply of a stock. Standard & Poor’s index methodology gives two distinct features of a stock’s ownership composition a supply interpretation. Both measures significantly predict the cross-sectional size of inclusion returns. Switching to free-floating index weights in 2005 enables a quasi-natural experiment to one proxy and a placebo test to the other. Finally, evidence from the most recent decade indicates that any persistence in the inclusion effect has disappeared.