Vote Trading and Information Aggregation

The standard analysis of corporate governance is that shareholders vote in the ratios that firms choose, such as one-share-one-vote. But if the cost of unbundling and trading votes is sufficiently low, then shareholders choose the ratios. We document an active market for votes within the equity-loan market, where the average vote sells for zero. We hypothesize that asymmetric information motivates this trade, and find support in the cross section of votes: there is more trade for higher-spread firms and more for poor performers, especially when the vote is close. Vote trading corresponds to support for shareholder proposals and opposition to management proposals. Similar results obtain in the U.K