Using the pay restriction imposed on CEOs of centrally administered state-owned enterprises (CSOEs) in China in 2009, we study the effects of limiting CEO pay. Compared with CEOs of firms not subject to the restriction, the CEOs of CSOEs experienced a significant pay cut. In response to the pay...

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides a crucial social safety net to workers as seen during the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper examines UI effects on takeover markets. We find that higher target state UI benefits raise acquisition likelihoods, deal synergies, and gains to acquirer and target...

Voting outcomes can differ from underlying preferences due to selection into voting. One source of such selection is lower participation of shareholders with popular preferences (free-rider effect) relative to that of those with unpopular preferences (underdog effect). We illustrate these...

We study retail shareholder voting using a detailed and nearly universal sample of anonymizedretail shareholder voting records over the period 2015-2017. Contrary to public perception, wefind that retail shareholders are an influential voting bloc, affecting as many proposal outcomes asthe Big...

Using the natural experiment created by France's 2011 board gender-quota law, we find that the presence of women on boards increases firms’ environmental and social (E&S) performance. Our results are robust to controlling for several directors’ observable characteristics and proxies for...

The paper studies a natural experiment in responsible investment conducted by the Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the largest public pension fund in the world. In 2018 GPIF gave its largest passive manager a remunerated mandate to improve the environmental (E), social (S) and...

We analyze voting records for management proposals and find that investors today hold directors accountable for a much wider range of issues, such as climate change and board diversity, than in the past. Within environment, climate change is the only subcategory that is significantly associated...

Investors are increasingly demonstrating a preference for superior ESG performance among their portfolio firms. Concurrently, the use of ESG-related contracting metrics in executive compensation contracts has increased. We investigate these two related issues in the context of the adoption of...

Eighty-nine percent of S&P500 companies report benchmarking CEO pay components. Analyzing a panel of CEO compensation data entailing 1,251 S&P 1500 firms during 2007-2013, we find that: 1) total compensation benchmarking less effectively explains CEO compensation than does component-of-pay...

We develop a model of freeze-out merger and tender offers and test it in an economy where merger and tender regulation are extremely different. Using a relatively large sample of 329 freeze-out offers in Israel during 2000-2019, we document evidence consistent with the model. We also find that...