GREGOR MATVOS
http://www.people.hbs.edu/gmatvos/
gmatvos@hbs.edu
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Placement Director: Claudia Goldin
Graduate Student Coordinator: Nicole Tateosian
Office Contact Information
Baker Library 420F
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Office: 617-496-9681
CGOLDIN@HARVARD.EDU
NATATEOS@FAS.HARVARD.EDU
617-495-3934
617-495-8927
Home Contact Information
1558 Massachusetts Ave., Apt. 25
Cambridge, MA 02138
Cell: 617-308-6014
Undergraduate Studies:
A.B., Economics, Harvard University, magna cum laude with highest honors in field, 2002
Graduate Studies:
Harvard University, 2002 to present
Thesis Title: Essays in Proxy Voting
Expected Completion Date: June 2007
Thesis Committee and References:
Professor Jeremy C. Stein
Harvard University
Littauer Center, Room 209
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617-496-6455
jeremy_stein@harvard.edu
Professor George P. Baker
Harvard Business School
Baker Library 461
Soldiers Field, Boston, MA 02163
Tel : 617-495-6119
gbaker@hbs.edu
Professor Malcolm P. Baker
Harvard Business School
Baker Library 261
Soldiers Field, Boston, MA 02163
Tel : 617-495-6566
mbaker@hbs.edu
Teaching and Research Fields:
Primary Fields: Corporate Finance; Organizational Economics.
Teaching Experience:
2002-2003
Economics 985a, Senior Thesis Seminar, teaching fellow for Professor Michael
Schwarz
Spring 2004
Economics 1818, teaching fellow for Professor Richard Freeman
Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships:
2006
Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research
2002-present
Doctoral Fellowship, Harvard Business School
2002-2004
Ad-Futura Scholarship, Government of Slovenia
2002
Phi Beta Kappa
1994-2004
Zois National Merit Fellowship
Conferences
June 2006
May 2005
Western Finance Association Annual Meeting: “Cross-Ownership, Returns, and Voting
in Mergers”
LBS Trans–Atlantic Doctoral Conference: “Manager Specific Human Capital
Investment: A Model of Block Trading and Firm Stability”
Research Papers:
“Strategic Proxy Voting” (with Michael Ostrovsky), September 2006.
(Job Market Paper)
Despite its importance, voting in the elections of corporate boards of directors remains relatively
unexplored in the empirical literature. We construct a comprehensive dataset of 3,204,890 mutual fund
votes in director elections that took place between July 2003 and June 2005. We find substantial
systematic heterogeneity in fund voting patterns: some mutual funds are management friendly, and others
are less so. We construct and estimate a model of voting in which mutual funds impose externalities on
each other: the cost of opposing management decreases when other funds oppose it as well. We exploit
fund heterogeneity to overcome the endogeneity problem induced by unobserved firm quality. We
estimate all parameters in the voting model and show that strategic interaction between funds is
economically and statistically significant. We then construct counterfactuals to compute the equilibrium
distribution of votes under alternative specifications of strategic externalities. We use the counterfactuals
to show that implementing confidential voting in board of director elections has potentially large
consequences on the equilibrium number of funds withholding their votes from directors.
“Cross-Ownership, Returns, and Voting in Mergers” (with Michael Ostrovsky), March 2006. Revise and
Resubmit, Journal of Financial Economics.
We show that institutional shareholders of acquiring companies on average do not lose money around
public merger announcements. This is in contrast to the previous literature, which has found significant
negative returns to acquiring companies’ shares around the announcements. The difference in findings is
due to the fact that institutional shareholders of acquiring companies also hold substantial stakes in the
targets, and make up for the losses from the former with the gains from the latter. Depending on their
holdings in the target, acquirer shareholders may realize different returns from the same merger, some
losing money and others gaining. Using a novel dataset we show that this conflict of interest is reflected
in the mutual fund voting behavior: in mergers with negative acquirer announcement returns, crossowners are more likely to vote for the merger.
“Manager Specific Human Capital Investment: A Model of Block Trading and Firm Stability,” February
2005
I develop a model in which workers can undertake specific human capital investments in the firm and in
the manager employed by the firm. If the manager leaves the firm, a worker has to decide whether to join
her in the new firm or stay in the old firm. In case of managerial turnover, the worker will be able to
productively employ only one type of her human capital; the other serves as an outside option when
bargaining with the firm she decides to work for. Using this dynamic, I am able to generate new testable
predictions on workers’ wage and productivity changes as a function of managerial turnover. I also
derive results on turnover and firm stability as a function of team size and manager tenure. For example, I
show that managerial turnover can cause a decrease in workers’ productivity and an increase in their
compensation; that exogenously increasing the probability of managerial turnover may motivate workers
to invest more in specific human capital, and that increasing the probability may be welfare improving
even if turnover itself is not. I also predict that workers in firms with larger teams and managers with
higher tenure experience smaller wage changes after managerial turnover.
Work in Progress:
“Interaction Between the Tools of Shareholder Oversight: Proxy Voting and the Wall Street Walk” (with
Michael Ostrovsky)
“Contracting and Renegotiation in the NFL”