Political voting rights have become the subject of sharp legal wrangling in American elections, and the focus of headlines and popular debate. Less attention has focused on American corporate elections, where something similar has been happening: the last two decades have witnessed significant...

Exploiting interstate branching deregulations during 1994-2005 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...

We find that minority shareholders’ voting opposition to dividend proposals is associated with significantly higher cash dividend payout in the following year for stocks listed in Shanghai Stock Exchange. When minority shareholders’ voting opposition increases, the likelihood and frequency...

We study how seemingly benign changes to voting costs affect electoral turnout, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the assignment of polling places in Munich (Germany). Using an event study design, we find that polling place relocations cause a persistent shift from in-person to mail-in...

We study how shocks to voting costs affect electoral turnout. Individuals whose polling place is relocated face changes to their cost of voting in person due to altered distance and unfamiliarity with the new polling place. Using address-level and precinct-level data, we find that polling place...

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...

This Element investigates the historical and systemic roots of hedge-fund activism. It argues that the spirit of the New Deal financial regulations was subverted in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of shareholder democracy and opened the door for the rise of hedge-fund activism. It analyzes the...