Universal owners can systemically diffuse their investment preferences to a large share of the market. We use the unexpected release of a corporate governance expectation document by Norway's sovereign wealth fund as a natural experiment to understand how active universal investors can influence...

This paper studies how managers react to shareholder empowerment vis-à-vis governance provisions. We show that a staggered legislative change that increases noncompliance costs in the implementation of shareholder-initiated majority voting proposals is followed by an increase in the submission...