About

Alon Brav is the Bratton Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1998 and has been a member of the Fuqua faculty since 1997. His current research focuses on corporate governance, shareholder voting, and hedge fund activism, with his work featured in prominent journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Financial Analysts Journal, and Columbia Law Review. Additionally, he has studied the debate between rational and behavioral finance and the literature on limits to arbitrage activities, with his research appearing in the Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, and Journal of Economic Methodology. Professor Brav is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), and serves as an associate editor at the Journal of Finance. He currently teaches Financial Management in the Weekend Executive MBA program and has previously taught courses in the Global Executive MBA, Master of Management, and Daytime MBA programs.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Business
• Finance
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Accounting
• Market economy
• Management
• Industrial organization
• Monetary economics
• Microeconomics
• Law

Selected publications

• Ownership and Voting Authority: Institutional Investors and Proxy Voting 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Proxy Voting Choice Revolution

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Flows, Financing Decisions, and Institutional Ownership of the U.S. Equity Market

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shareholder Monitoring through Voting: New Evidence from Proxy Contests

  Review of Financial Studies · 2023-08-11 · 53 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We present the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Among contests where voting takes place, passive funds are 10 percentage points less likely than active funds to vote for dissidents. The gap shrinks significantly when accounting for votes withheld from management nominees, settled contests, and votes by non-“Big-Three” fund families. Passive and active funds are equally informed about firm fundamentals, although passive funds view contest-related SEC filings more often than active funds during contests, in absolute levels and incrementally relative to noncontest periods. We conclude that passive funds are engaged shareholders in high-stakes voting events. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online

  PublisherDOI

• Private Equity and Venture Capital Fund Performance: Evidence from a Large Sample of Israeli Limited Partners

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shareholder Monitoring Through Voting: New Evidence from Proxy Contests

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Corporate Governance Implications of the Growth in Indexing

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance · 2023-08-21 · 5 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Passively managed (index) funds have grown to become among the largest shareholders in many publicly traded companies. Their large ownership stakes and voting power have attracted the attention of market participants, academics, and regulators and have sparked an active debate about their corporate governance role. While many studies explore the governance implications of passive fund growth, they often come to conflicting conclusions. To understand how the growth in indexing can affect governance, it is important to understand fund managers’ incentives to be engaged shareholders. These incentives depend on fund managers’ compensation contracts, ownership stakes, assets under management, and costs of engagement. Major passive asset managers, such as the Big Three (BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard), may have incentives to be engaged even though they track the indices and their engagement efforts benefit all other funds that track the same indices. This is because such funds’ substantial ownership stakes in multiple firms can both increase the effectiveness of their engagement and create relatively large financial benefits from engagement despite the low fees they collect. However, there is a difference between large and small index fund families: the incentives of the latter are likely to be substantially smaller, and the empirical evidence appears to be consistent with this distinction. The governance effects of passive fund growth also depend on where flows to passive funds come from, which investors are replaced by passive funds in firms’ ownership structures, how passive funds interact with other shareholders, and how their growth affects other asset managers’ compensation structures. Considering such aggregate effects and interactions can help reconcile the seemingly conflicting findings in the empirical literature. It also suggests that policymakers should be careful in using the existing studies to understand the aggregate governance effects of passive fund growth over the past decades. Overall, the literature has made important progress in understanding and quantifying passive funds’ incentives to engage, their monitoring activities and voting practices, and their interactions with other shareholders. Based on the findings in the literature, there is yet no clear answer to whether passive fund growth has been beneficial or detrimental for governance, and there are many open questions remaining. These open questions suggest several important directions for future research in this area.

  PublisherDOI

• Corporate Governance Implications of the Growth in Indexing

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-12-01 · 13 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Passively managed funds have grown to become some of the largest shareholders in publicly traded companies, but there is considerable debate about the effects of this growth on corporate governance. The goal of this paper is to review the literature on the governance implications of passive fund growth and discuss directions for future research. In particular, we present a framework to understand the incentives of passive and actively managed funds to engage in governance, review the empirical evidence in the context of this framework, and highlight the questions that remain unanswered.

  PublisherDOI

• Corporate Governance Implications of the Growth in Indexing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Governance by Persuasion: Hedge Fund Activism and Market-Based Shareholder Influence

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance · 2022-10-18 · 38 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Hedge fund activism refers to the phenomenon where hedge fund investors acquire a strict minority block of shares in a target firm and then attempt to pressure management for changes in corporate policies and governance with the aim to improve firm performance. This study provides an updated empirical analysis as well as a comprehensive survey of the academic finance research on hedge fund activism. Beginning in the early 1990s, shareholder engagement by activist hedge funds has evolved to become both an investment strategy and a remedy for poor corporate governance. Hedge funds represent a group of highly incentivized, value-driven investors who are relatively free from regulatory and structural barriers that have constrained the monitoring by other external investors. While traditional institutional investors have taken actions ex-post to preserve value or contain observed damage (such as taking the “Wall Street Walk”), hedge fund activists target underperforming firms in order to unlock value and profit from the improvement. Activist hedge funds also differ from corporate raiders that operated in the 1980s, as they tend to accumulate minority equity stakes and do not seek direct control. As a result, activists must win support from fellow shareholders via persuasion and influence, representing a hybrid internal-external role in a middle-ground form of corporate governance. Research on hedge fund activism centers on how it impacts the target company, its shareholders, other stakeholders, and the capital market as a whole. Opponents of hedge fund activism argue that activists focus narrowly on short-term financial performance, and such “short-termism” may be detrimental to the long-run value of target companies. The empirical evidence, however, supports the conclusion that interventions by activist hedge funds lead to improvements in target firms, on average, in terms of both short-term metrics, such as stock value appreciation, and long-term performance, including productivity, innovation, and governance. Overall, the evidence from the full body of the literature generally supports the view that hedge fund activism constitutes an important venue of corporate governance that is both influence-based and market-driven, placing activist hedge funds in a unique position to reduce the agency costs associated with the separation of ownership and control.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Wei Jiang

  Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  110 shared

• Christopher Géczy

  Jacobs Levy Equity Management

  74 shared

• George A. Constantinides

  64 shared

• Roni Michaely

  50 shared

• Lucian A. Bebchuk

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  46 shared

• John R. Graham

  43 shared

• Thomas Keusch

  40 shared

• Campbell R. Harvey

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  38 shared

Awards & honors

• Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize (1998)
• Barclays Global Investors Michael Brennan Award (2003)
• Jensen Prize for the best corporate finance paper published…
• Barclays Global Investors Michael Brennan Award (2016)
• Jensen Prize for the best corporate finance and organization…