The nineteenth century saw the standardization and rapid spread of the modern business corporation around the world. Yet those early corporations differed from their contemporary counterparts in important ways. Most obviously, they commonly deviated from the one-share-one-vote rule that is...

I examine how the structure of CEO compensation affects Say-on-Pay (SOP) voting and how SOP outcomes influence subsequent changes to compensation structure. I find that voting dissent decreases as the percent of performance sensitive compensation including equity and non-equity incentive...

In a typical public company, shareholders can elect the board, appoint auditors, and approve fundamental changes. Firms with dual class share (DCS) structures alter this balance by inviting the subordinate shareholders to carry the financial risk of investing in the corporation without providing...

We examine investors' perceptions of shareholder activism via voting. To identify instances of activism via voting, we focus on annual meetings with at least one ballot item where a substantial fraction of shareholders is expected to vote against management's voting recommendation, indicating an...

Using a sample of public European firms and a multitude of shifts in cross-country taxation data, we examine the influence of individual shareholders' tax incentives on capital structure. We find that the largest shareholder's tax incentive for debt positively influences leverage. We also find...