Hedge Fund Agents: The New Player

In this video, Professor John C Coffee, Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law, Columbia University, discusses his winning paper in the ECGI Law Series in 2017. It examines the “new world of hedge fund activism.” New agent –which aggregates the support of many institutional investors and brings pressure to bear on the board for issues that it believes will be value maximizing.” That’s basically good, Coffee says, but warns that “new agents always involve new agency costs.”