We use the practice of employee option repricing to investigate how shareholder involvement in firm compensation policies affects the quality of firm governance. We find that a 2003 reform that empowered shareholders to approve or reject repricing proposals led to value increases in previous...

This paper proposes a new method using option prices to estimate the market value of the voting right associated with a stock. The method consists of synthesizing a non-voting share using put-call parity, and comparing its price to that of the underlying stock. Empirically, we find this measure...

Voting trust arrangements have a long history at both the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Surface Transportation Board as devices to protect the incentives of acquiring firms and maintain the independence of acquiring and target firms during the pendency of regulatory investigation of the...

People often do not vote, and those who do sometimes unwittingly vote against their interests. That is because voters have little incentive to cast intelligent votes in any given election, even though they clearly have a stake in the intelligent outcome of every election. A simple solution would...

Corporate governance and the relationship between managers and owners has undergone rapid evolution in recent years. As part of this process, shareholders have obtained greater ability to influence the behavior of the board of directors. In seeking to exert influence, shareholders often do so...

This contribution tracks the legislative, scholarly and judicial debate concerning different classes of shares and voting rights that developed in Italy from the early XIX century to the recent introduction of multiple voting shares. In doing so, we offer some comparative perspectives and...

We study to what extent media pressure and firm's reputational concerns encourage corporate governance improvements. Our test sample comprises 72 European dual-class-shares firms that voluntarily unified their shares into a single class. We find that when the press' anti-dual-class-shares...