American investors have begun to embrace the reality that academics have been championing for decades — that a broad-based passive indexing strategy is superior to picking individual stocks or investing in actively managed funds. But there are several reasons to believe that this trend will...

I introduce a model of shareholder voting. I describe and provide characterizations of three families of shareholder voting rules: ratio rules, difference rules, and share majority rules. The characterizations rely on two key axioms: merger consistency, which requires consistency in voting...

We examine the impact of earnings announcements on the value of shareholder voting rights (voting premium) estimated using a new technique that exploits option prices. We find the voting premium is negatively related to earnings surprises. This relation is primarily driven by unfavorable...

'One-share, one-vote,' a bedrock principle of Anglo-Saxon corporate governance, is back in the spotlight. Except this time, the aim is to diminish its application rather than to extend its global footprint.Hoping to stem the tide of short-termism in the financial markets, prominent commentators...

We find that shareholder turnout at the general meeting of Norwegian public firms varies between 11% and 95%, being 59% on average. This turnout behavior implies that majority control requires less than one third of the average firm's shares, and that attending shareholders vote for 1.7 times...

The Securities and Exchange Commission's (“SEC” or “Commission”) recent staff roundtable on the proxy process, and its resulting guidance, interpretation and proposed rules on limiting the use of shareholder proposals, regulating proxy advisors and their creation of shareholder voting...

‘Shareholder rights' are the legal entitlements of shareholders via-a-vis companies in which they invest. A large body of research has sought to investigate how shareholder rights foster accountability of controllers. The concern has been that without accountability, managers and dominant...