Download This PaperActivism, Strategic Trading, and Liquidity
56 Pages Posted: 23 Nov 2016 Last revised: 24 May 2018
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Activism, Strategic Trading, and Liquidity
Activism, Strategic Trading, and Liquidity
Activism, Strategic Trading, and Liquidity
Date Written: October 2017
Abstract
We analyze dynamic trading by an activist investor who can expend costly effort to affect firm value. We obtain the equilibrium in closed form for a general activism technology, including both binary and continuous outcomes. Variation in parameters can produce either positive or negative relations between market liquidity and economic efficiency, depending on the activism technology and model parameters. Two results that contrast with the previous literature are that (a) the relation between market liquidity and economic efficiency is independent of the activist's initial stake for a broad set of activism technologies and (b) an increase in noise trading can reduce market liquidity, because it increases uncertainty about the activist's trades (the activist trades in the opposite direction of noise traders) and thereby increases information asymmetry about the activist's intentions.
Keywords: Kyle model, insider trading, strategic trading, asymmetric information, liquidity, price impact, market depth, activism, unobservable effort, economic efficiency, continuous time
JEL Classification: G34, G14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Swiss Finance Institute
c/o University of Geneva
40, Bd du Pont-d'Arve
CH-1211 Geneva 4
Switzerland
European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )
c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium
European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)
c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium