Institutional investors and corporate governance

We provide a comprehensive overview of the role of institutional investors in corporate governance with three main components. First, we establish new stylized facts documenting the evolution and importance of institutional ownership. Second, we provide a detailed characterization of key aspects of the legal and regulatory setting within which institutional investors govern portfolio firms. Third, we synthesize the evolving response of the recent theoretical and empirical academic literature in finance to the emergence of institutional investors in corporate governance. We highlight how the defining aspect of institutional investors – the fact that they are financial intermediaries – differentiates them in their governance role from standard principal blockholders. Further, not all institutional investors are identical, and we pay close attention to heterogeneity amongst institutional investors as blockholders

Source fidelity over fading channels: Erasure codes versus scalable codes

Abstract — We consider the transmission of a Gaussian source through a block fading channel. Assuming each block is decoded independently, the received distortion depends on the tradeoff between quantization accuracy and probability of outage. Namely, higher quantization accuracy requires a higher channel code rate, which increases the probability of outage. Here we evaluate the received mean distortion with erasure coding across blocks as a function of the code length. We also evaluate the performance of scalable, or multi-resolution coding in which coded layers are superimposed, and the layers are sequentially decoded. In addition to analyzing a finite number of layers, we evaluate the mean distortion at high Signal-to-Noise Ratios as the number of layers becomes infinite. As the block length of the erasure code increases to infinity, the received distortion converges to a deterministic limit, which is less than the mean distortion with an infinite-layer scalable coding scheme. However, for the same standard deviation in received distortion, infinite layer scalable coding performs slightly better than erasure coding. I