Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

This Congressional testimony, requested by the House Financial Services Committee, reviews the history and current state of the federal shareholder proposal rule and how it has been seized by special interests to push agendas at odds with shareholder interests; ponders the conundrum that passive...

This chapter examines dual class common stock. Dual class stock has evolved from a vehicle used largely by insiders in family owned and media companies to retain control into a popular capital structure for founders and initial shareholders in technology start-ups. After briefly reviewing the...

Traditionally, fund managers cast votes on behalf of investors whose capital they manage. Recently, this system has come under intense debate given the growing concentration of voting power among a few asset managers and disagreements over environmental and social issues. Major fund managers now...

Recent years have seen a reemergence of the practice of awarding “mega grants” to CEOs. Mega grants are large, one-time equity awards granted in lieu of or in addition to annual awards with the intended purpose of providing significant incentive to the CEO to achieve long-term targets. The...

This research explores the influence of shareholder votes on corporate governance and firm performance within U.S.-listed companies. By exercising their right to vote, shareholders can express their approval or disapproval of corporate governance practices. To comprehensively examine the effects...

Shareholder say-on-pay votes allow institutional investors to influence the incentives of managers and, consequently, corporate behaviour. Surprisingly, the preferences of investors on executive compensation have been largely overlooked in the ongoing debates on sustainable corporate behaviour....

We present the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Among contests where voting takes place, passive funds are ten percentage points less likely than active funds to vote for dissidents. The gap shrinks significantly when accounting for votes withheld from...

The fine balance between prevention of minority shareholder rights and the independent will of the majority shareholders to run the company they majorly hold is largely dependent on the securities enforcement agencies of the country. In India, The SEBI has engaged in minority protections at the...

Exchanges and index providers increasingly push firms to equalize shareholder voting rights. We explore the potential harm arising from dual-class structures by studying the identity and returns of minority shareholders. First, we find that sophisticated investors disproportionately own...

We examine the effect of voting requirements in M&A transactions on managerial disclosure, information asymmetries, and voting outcomes. We find that voting requirements lead firms to provide more disclosure and in a timelier manner, including disclosure of the merger agreement, information on...

This paper examines racial preferences of shareholders in the context of corporate director elections. Focusing on director nominees receiving negative recommendations from the dominant proxy advisor ISS, we document a higher propensity of mutual fund managers to vote for such nominees who match...

While mutual funds are required to vote on directors in every portfolio firm every year, many funds satisfy this requirement by following the recommendations of proxy advisory service companies such as ISS. However, companies complain that ISS employs one-size-fits-all policies, which do not...

The increasing use of dual class voting structures in public companies, and the frequency with which such structures contain sunset provisions, raises the issue of when and how such sunset provisions should be modified, extending the company’s use of the dual class structure. Recent decisions...

The shareholders are the owners of the corporation. The corporation has a separate legal existence independent of the shareholder-owners and a shareholder is not liable to the corporation or its creditors with respect to the shares except to pay the consideration for which the shares were...

In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. In some cases shareholders are pushing companies to take actions that may reduce market value. It is hard to understand this behavior using the dominant corporate governance...

The traditional view in corporate governance, shareholder primacy, holds that boards and executives should manage corporations with a single-minded focus on increasing financial returns to shareholders. By contrast, advocates of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria and stakeholder...

New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study...

We create a novel dataset to examine the nature and determinants of dual-class IPOs. We document that dual-class firms have different types of controlling shareholders and wedges between voting and economic rights. We find that the founders' wedge is largest when founders have stronger...

We study how granting shareholders an advisory compensation vote affects the subsequent demand for shareholder voting rights. We find that the voting premium decreases when shareholders are given the right to disapprove firm compensation plans, consistent with firms taking preemptive actions...

I study the effect of passive institutional ownership on the horizon of CEO pay. A one-standard-deviation increase in passive ownership leads to a 0.46-standard-deviation increase in the compensation duration. I find evidence of proxy voting by passive investors as the channels through which...

Exploiting interstate branching deregulations as exogenous shocks to banking market competition, we examine the impact of increased market competition on shareholder voting in the U.S. banking industry. Voting is one of the primary mechanisms through which shareholders participate in corporate...

We examine the efficacy of proxy voting to limit inflated CEO pay. We find that the percentage of dissenting votes that go against director-sponsored compensation proposals increases following a staggered rejection of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (RIDD), which increases CEOs’ job...

Dual class shares and the anticompetitive effects of common ownership are two of the most discussed corporate governance issues of our time. In this Article, we identify a hidden connection between them, which allows us to derive policy implications that are relevant for both.The traditional...

While the rise of dual-class companies — companies with high-vote and low-vote shares — has been widely observed over the past decade, prior commentators have largely overlooked the important “equal treatment” agreements that are embedded in the majority of these dual-class structures....

We construct a novel data set to show that, between 2003-2020, up to one-fifth of America's largest firms had a non-financial blockholder or insider as their largest shareholder. Blockholders and insiders tend to be less diversified than institutional investors. Measures of "universal" and...

Firms with female CEOs receive more shareholder proposals, especially lower-quality proposals, than firms with male CEOs. Institutional investors are more likely to sponsor environmental/social proposals that are ultimately withdrawn after private negotiations, while individual investors sponsor...