This paper develops a theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium. A blockholder and dispersed shareholders first trade in a competitive market and then vote at a shareholder meeting. A positive voting premium emerges only...
European corporate law and corporate governance are moving ahead beyond expectation. Some British voices called this ?a renaissance in the past decade?. In December 2012, the European Commission came forward with an Action Plan that...
Currently, the European approach addressing related party transactions is exclusively relying on the disclosure and partial control of the transaction. Listed European corporations must provide in a (financial) summarized...
We conduct an exploratory analysis of how researchers can address the issue of ?construct validity?, which poses a major challenge to all studies of the effect of corporate governance on firm performance. Many corporate governance...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...