The fragmentation of the party system has confronted the German mixed-member proportional electoral system with a trilemma. It can only ensure two out of three goals: proportionality, guaranteed representation of district winners, and a fixed and predictable size of the Bundestag. This paper...

We empirically identify politically-motivated redistricting and its consequences, studying the effects of changed electorate composition on US congressional district boundaries and on political outcomes. We exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which legalized millions of...

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) paved the road to Black empowerment. How did southern whites respond? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration rates by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we...

Shareholder say-on-pay votes allow institutional investors to influence the incentives of managers and, consequently, corporate behaviour. Surprisingly, the preferences of investors on executive compensation have been largely overlooked in the ongoing debates on sustainable corporate behaviour....

We present the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Among contests where voting takes place, passive funds are ten percentage points less likely than active funds to vote for dissidents. The gap shrinks significantly when accounting for votes withheld from...

The fine balance between prevention of minority shareholder rights and the independent will of the majority shareholders to run the company they majorly hold is largely dependent on the securities enforcement agencies of the country. In India, The SEBI has engaged in minority protections at the...

Exchanges and index providers increasingly push firms to equalize shareholder voting rights. We explore the potential harm arising from dual-class structures by studying the identity and returns of minority shareholders. First, we find that sophisticated investors disproportionately own...