Literatures of corporate governance claim that expropriation by controlling owner towards the listed firm emerges when separation of cash flow and control rights exist, and that the separation emerges when dual class shares or pyramiding corporate structures exist. In China, dual class share and...

We examine whether shareholder votes can influence the audit committee and whether this influence is uniform across non-staggered and staggered boards. We find that through voting, shareholders can increase the efficacy of the audit committee, leading to improvements in audit committee...

Conventional wisdom regards the combination of a staggered board with a dual-class capital structure as superfluous. However, the incidence of this combination in U.S. firms, identified in this Paper, is not trivial. This Paper considers a few possible motivations for this practice and reports...

This paper shows that proxy contests have a significant adverse effect on careers of incumbent directors. Following a proxy contest, directors experience a significant decline in number of directorships not only in the targeted company, but also in other non-targeted companies. The results are...

This paper examines the SEC regulation requiring non-binding general shareholder vote on executive compensation–“say-on-pay” (SOP). We examine the first two years of SOP in the Russell 3000. The results confirm previous shareholder-proposal studies by finding that SOP approval (reject)...

The value of a right should not be lower than zero. The present paper overcomes some possible measurement errors and proposes a new measure of the voting right, the Relative Vote Segment, which incorporates dividend privileges into the inferior class of shares, when granted. Results from Italian...

We examine the structure of lending syndicates formed to provide credit to the non-financial U.S. firms between 1990 and 2007. We find a significant relationship between the level of shareholder rights (as proxied by GIndex) of the borrowing firms and composition of their lending syndicate....

Is the governance of banks different from other corporations? Which regulation and public policies enhance the governance of banks? We address these questions investigating the existence and magnitude of private benefits of control in banks around the world. We construct a new database covering...