The paper’s prime objective is to understand the impact of Shareholder activism on firm performance. This study is conducted in a unique setup where traditional activist investors such as pension funds and hedge funds are not present. However, the activism cases are increasing yearly in an...

This research examines the relation between shareholder litigation and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Exploiting exogenous changes in shareholder litigation rights following the staggered adoption of universal demand laws by U.S. states and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling on...

Integration of the corporate and individual income taxes can be achieved by providing shareholders a credit for corporate taxes paid with respect to corporate earnings distributed as dividends. When such integration was previously considered in the U.S., proponents emphasized that it could...

This study examines the effect of shareholder taxes on bank risk-taking. Economic theory predicts that personal tax rates affect individual risk-taking through risk-sharing with the government via full loss offsets. Exploiting the passive activity loss limitations and detailed ownership data for...

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a sample of nearly 3878 such announcements in 1176 large firms during the 1970-97 period collected from the Wall Street Journal Index. We note that, although there has been a dramatic secular increase in...

We investigate the effects of blockholder exit threats, which increase with stock liquidity, on corporate cash holdings and the value of cash to shareholders. Exploiting decimalization as an exogenous shock to stock liquidity to identify the effects of blockholder exit threats, we find robust...

The ongoing controversy over Melrose’s purchase of engineering company GKN illustrates many common misunderstandings about how free markets can work to the benefit of all. Shareholders, not politicians, should decide how to run their businesses, including whether a new management team could do...

This article describes and analyses the recent significant increase in Australia of resolutions proposed by shareholders focused on environmental, social and governance (‘ESG’) issues. The research is placed in the context of the legal framework in which shareholder resolutions are advanced....

This paper examines the impact of cross-country variation in shareholders' and debt holders' rights on post-IPO performance and survival of newly listed stocks across the globe. Using a sample of 10,490 initial public offerings (IPOs) in 40 countries between 2000 and 2013, we find that post-IPO...

On 24 January 2019, a revised Singapore Code on Take-overs and Mergers (the Take-overs Code) was promulgated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on the advice of the Securities Industry Council (the SIC).The revisions are to ensure that takeover practices targeting at companies with the...

Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that...

Does a decline in shareholder litigation enhance managers’ monitoring efforts by ensuring adequate firm risk management? We explore how state Universal Demand laws (which limit shareholder litigation as a mechanism to discipline managers, UD law hereafter), affects bank holding companies’...

Most Brazilian public corporations have controlling majority shareholders. Meanwhile, the Brazilian tax code regarding payout income treats differently different kinds of shareholders depending upon their legal nature. Therefore, depending upon the controlling shareholder’s identity, the...

By exploiting the local randomness in close-call votes on governance-related shareholder proposals, this paper finds a negative effect of passing a governance proposal on firms’ ex-ante tail risk measured by the cost of option protection against downside tail risks, which suggests that...

This article focusses on a very specific problem statement, namely how shareholder society relationships are viewed in Australia and South Africa. Friendly societies are special "legal creatures" enjoying legal personality from the date and time of their registration (not as companies). In South...

We study long-run shareholder outcomes for over 64,000 global common stocks during the January 1990 to December 2020 period. We document that the majority, 55.2% of U.S. stocks and 57.4% of non-U.S. stocks, underperform one-month U.S. Treasury bills in terms of compound returns over the full...

This study examines the effect of shareholder scrutiny of tax issues on corporate tax behavior. Specifically, we examine the factors associated with receiving shareholder tax litigation and the effect of such litigation on the future tax behavior of both the sued firm and its peers. We find...

Within capital markets, institutional investors’ nascent focus on environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) issues is transforming the market for corporate control. Using their ever-increasing ownership of public companies as leverage, these voting blocs color their interactions with...

An inquiry into the innate nature of a tax presupposes examination of an intricate web of variables, which on most occasions results into raging debates. For examples, whether a tax on service provider is a tax on service or a professional tax, whether a tax on capital value of assets is same as...

There is no question that Switzerland embraces capitalism and has a market-oriented economy. At the same time, a grassroots-oriented political system has allowed for the emergence of a uniquely Swiss stakeholder-oriented business regime.Hence, Swiss corporate law generally embraces the...

Within less than twenty years the idea of shareholder stewardship has become a global phenomenon. In 2010, the United Kingdom hastily released the world’s first stewardship code to cure what was perceived to be the UK’s primary corporate governance malady: rationally passive institutional...

By exploiting the local randomness in close-call votes on governance-related shareholder proposals, this paper finds a negative effect of passing a governance proposal on firms’ ex-ante tail risk measured by the cost of option protection against downside tail risks, which suggests that...

Shareholder activism – defined as dissatisfied investors attempting to initiate change in a company without a change in control – has long been a feature of the US investment landscape. The practice is increasingly being exported abroad as funds search for new opportunities in under-explored...

We study how the spillover of peer firms’ litigation risk affects a focal firm’s voluntary disclosure. We find that focal firms facing greater litigation risk spillovers reduce disclosure activities by lowering both the likelihood of issuance and the frequency of management earnings...

This article shows that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is positively related to firm value, given firms have shareholders who reveal a corresponding preference for social or environmental performance, as proxied by their quantifiable investment habits. I suspect that this corresponds to...

Shareholders of U.S. corporations have lost billions of dollars in acquisitions they never approved. In the United Kingdom the listing rules give shareholders a binding say when targets are large relative to acquirers. A transatlantic comparison suggests that if U.S. shareholders had a say on...

Shareholder value maximization has spurred a long-standing and heated debate between the proponents of a unified corporate objective function and the supporters of multi-constituency goals of the corporation. We weigh in on the corporate purpose debate from a different point of view: that of the...

This paper investigates the role of institutional investors in the improvement of corporate governance for the companies in which they invest (investee companies) using evidence about the attributes of boards of directors across 15 countries. Furthermore, this paper examines the extent to which...

Does enhanced shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,200 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. The distress rate of limited liability banks was 29% higher than that...

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to study the impact of divestitures on shareholder wealth. This study covers selloffs of publicly traded companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH region) during the period 2002-2018. It aims to understand the overall effect of selloffs on...

According to classic corporate governance theory, strengthening large shareholders' cash flow rights without changing their control rights should reduce expropriation incentives by better aligning their interests with those of minority shareholders. However, due to the weaker investor...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a topic which has recently been attracting an increasing amount of attention with respect to corporate operations, and shareholder proposals on CSR are also one of the main types of proposals at firms’ annual shareholder meetings. However, even though...