Argh! They beat me to the punch!
In Activist Arbitrage: A Study of Open-Ending Attempts of Closed-End Funds, which was co-written with Michael Bradley, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang, and which was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Financial Economics, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study of the attempts of activist arbitrageurs to open-end closed-end funds in the U.S. Unlike the traditional pure-trading arbitrage, activist arbitrageurs do not simply wait for convergence, but rather take actions to open-end the target fund, knowing that upon open-ending the price of the fund’s shares will be forced to converge to the NAV.
For the past three months I’ve been working on a paper with a similar topic: activist investors and closed-end fund arbitrage. I haven’t yet read the aforementioned paper, but I’m sure its a lot more in-depth and technical than my paper. The goal I had with my paper was to create a sort of Idiot’s Guide to Closed-End Fund Arbitrage and Activist Investors. I explain the methods, goals, and arguments of both the activists and fund management, give a walkthrough of some actual proxy contests, and discuss some of the shareholder issues that arise.
I should have my paper finished within the next month or so and I might post it online.
Hi. Have you completed and posted the paper you reference here?
Would definitely be very interested in this paper, in particular for the actual proxy contests, and situations where the entrenched management was able to frustrate the activist investors.