The role of institutional investors in corporate and entrepreneurial finance

Abstract

Institutional investors, collectively the majority shareholders of most publicly traded corporations, play important roles in almost all aspects of corporate finance. This special issue puts together sixteen papers covering a wide range of topics, such as M&As, capital structure, bonds and loans, corporate governance, IPOs, VCs, SEOs, broker/underwriter relationships, behavioral finance, corporate disclosure, and regulation. These special issue papers demonstrate that institutional investors, a traditional focus of investments research, are worthy of continued and further academic inquiry in many corporate finance topics. In terms of directions for future research, we believe that the availability of new datasets (or existing datasets not yet widely used in corporate finance) and the application of new or unique research methodologies could bear fruit for researchers, as demonstrated by some papers in this special issue. In terms of datasets, the success of Abel Noser institutional trading data serves as a good example.