Using a unique sample, we attempt to identify the consequence of the separation between inside ownership and control for firm performance. We exploit the fact that banking institutions may hold their own shares in trust to construct a clean...Read more
This paper looks at shareholder activism from the perspective of the revision of the EU Shareholder Rights Directive, which was approved by the European Parliament on 14 March 2017. The main findings are as follows.
First, the effective...Read more
Union and public pension funds, the most prolific institutional activists employing low-cost targeting methods, are often accused of pursuing private benefits. Extant literature finds that unions representing workers, as stakeholders, are not...Read more
Despite the increasing importance of shareholder voting, regulators have paid little attention to the rights of retail investors who own approximately 30% of publicly traded companies but who vote less than 30% of their shares. A substantial...Read more
Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric...Read more
Well-constructed, country-specific “corporate governance indices” can predict higher firm values in emerging markets. However, there is little credible research on which aspects of governance drive that overall relationship. We study that...Read more
Firms can issue stocks classified in many ways. They can be classified in respect to voting rights, dividend rights, redemption rights, conversion rights, and many others. In this study, we ask if it is desirable to give greater freedom to firms...Read more
Index funds and indexed ETFs managed by the “Big Three” – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – have grown to be the largest investors in the capital markets and have become the presumptive “deciders” of corporate law controversies. With this...Read more
We study shareholder voting in a model in which trading affects the composition of the shareholder base. Trading and voting are complementary, which gives rise to self-fulfilling expectations about proposal acceptance and multiple equilibria....Read more
We analyze rights offerings and public offerings in a setting where better informed current shareholders strategically choose to subscribe. When all current shareholders have wealth to participate, rights offerings achieve the full information...Read more
Shareholder inspection rights allow a shareholder to access the relevant documents of the company in which they hold an interest, so as to address the problem of information asymmetry and reduce the agency costs inherent in the corporate...Read more
A set of policy experiments regarding binding votes on compensation in Switzerland sheds light on the hitherto mostly theoretical argument that shareholders may prefer to have limits on their own power. The empirical evidence suggests a trade-off...Read more