We provide large-sample evidence on whether U.S. publicly traded corporations opportunistically use voluntary disclosures about their commitments to employee diversity. We document significant discrepancies between companies' disclosed commitments and their hiring practices and classify firms that discuss diversity more than their actual employee gender and racial diversity warrants as “diversity washers." We find diversity-washing firms obtain superior scores from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating organizations and attract investment from institutional investors with an ESG focus. These outcomes occur even though diversity-washing firms are more likely to incur discrimination violations and pay larger fines for these actions. Our study highlights the consequences of selective ESG disclosures on an important social dimension of employee diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In this paper I explore the relationship between the rise of hedge fund activism and firm outcomes, using a study design that explicitly takes into account how activists pick their targets. Contrary to much prior work, I find no evidence that activism is associated with increased firm operating performance or significant long-term returns once comparing to firms based on their similarity to the targets. However, activism does increase firm payouts to shareholders and decreases investment, consistent with the argument of many critics of activism. I also find that firm-level employment declines significantly following a targeting event, and that the subset of firms that experience an increase in operating performance also engage in higher levels of tax avoidance. The deregulation of proxy access rules, wholesale de-staggering of corporate boards, and the rise in importance of proxy advisory firms who frequently recommend voting for activist proposals have made firms more susceptible to aggressive activism over the past three decades. The results in this paper, coupled with the rhetorical shift in focus from short-term profits to sustainable growth by large institutional investors, suggest a re-framing of the public debate over the benefits of shareholder activism.

A longstanding debate over the impact of state antitakeover provisions has emerged among scholars in law and finance. Corporate law practitioners and researchers argue that the second generation of antitakeover statutes were made redundant by the affirmation of rights plans, while empirical scholars have found wide-ranging impacts from their adoption when used as an exogenous shocks to managerial entrenchment. This paper subjects the standard approach used in the empirical literature to a series of straightforward sensitivity analyses, consistent with the present best practice in panel data analysis. Contrary to the majority of published research, there is scant evidence for a consistent and reliable impact of antitakeover statute adoption on common firm outcome measures. These findings are consistent with the legal argument that takeover statutes provide little additional takeover deterrence in the presence of a ``shadow pill.''