The D & O Diary reports on June 1, 2009, that one of Congress’ goals when it instituted the "lead plaintiff" provisions of the PSLRA was to encourage institutional investors to become more involved in controlling and monitoring securities class action lawsuits. But now that institutional investors are indeed more involved in securities lawsuits, the question has become – what difference has it made? A recent academic study suggests that institutional investor involvement in securities litigation not only enhances investors’ success in seeking financial recovery, but also improves the quality of the defendant companies’ corporate governance.

The authors conclude that securities litigation is an effective corporate monitoring tool for institutional investors. A January 2009 paper entitled "Institutional Monitoring through Shareholder Litigation", by Agnes Cheng of LSU, Henry He Huang of Prairie View A&M University, Yinghua Li of Purdue, and Gerald Lobo of University of Houston, examined all securities lawsuits that were filed from January 1, 1996 to July 20, 2005 and that had been resolved by June 1, 2006. 1,811 lawsuits met these selection criteria, of which 1,525 lawsuits were led by individual lead plaintiffs, 178 lawsuits were led by at least one public/union pension fund or mutual fund, and 108 lawsuits were led by other categories of institutions.

Among other things, the authors found a "trend of increasing institutional involvement in securities litigation." The percentage of lawsuits with institutional investor lead plaintiffs has more than doubled from less than 15% in 1996 to more than 30% in 2004. The authors were most concerned in determining the effect of institutional investor involvement in case outcomes. Prior research had already shown that cases with institutional investor lead plaintiffs result in larger settlements, primarily because institutional investors tend to become more involved in the larger, more serious cases….