How Shifting from In-Person to Virtual-Only Shareholder Meetings Affects Shareholders’ Voice

Virtual-only shareholder meetings have become dramatically more common following COVID-19. Analysis of transcripts and recordings of in-person versus virtual-only shareholder meetings show that virtual-only meetings are shorter and dedicate less time to addressing shareholders’ concerns. I construct a unique dataset documenting questions shareholders submitted at virtual-only shareholder meetings. Precisely when shareholders vote against management recommendation, indicating contention with management, firms are likely to limit shareholders’ voice: they ignore shareholders’ questions and explicitly limit the scope of questions addressed. Such actions are shown to limit the extent of communication at shareholder meetings