Essay question: Does empirical evidence suggest that institutional investors can perform the monitoring role on behalf of their investors and society as a whole? Required Paper: Gillan, Stuart L., and Laura T. Starks, Corporate Governance, Corporate Ownership, and the Role of Institutional Investors: A Global Perspective, Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance Working Paper No. 2003-01, August 2003. Published in the Journal of Applied Finance, 2003. (Attached) Other Questions to be addressed: What role can institutional shareholders play in corporate governance? How can their effects vary according to the type of institutional shareholder? How do agency problems within institutional shareholders affect how they monitor firms? What does the empirical evidence say?
