This paper studies SEC no-action letter decisions that determine whether companies can exclude shareholder proposals from their proxy statements. During the period 2007–2019, the market reacted positively when the SEC permitted exclusion, suggesting that investors viewed those proposals as...

Shareholder proposals are increasingly important tools for corporate reformers, yet courts, policy makers, and scholars are concerned that proposals may be used "opportunistically" as bargaining chips by activists to extract side payments from management. This paper investigates whether labor...

This paper estimates to what extent proxy advice allows funds to vote as if they were informed. A fund’s vote is classified as “informed“ if the fund accessed the company’s proxy statement from the SEC’s Edgar website prior to voting. A fund’s proxy advisor, if any, is identified...

This paper investigates how often and under what conditions legislators vote in accordance with constituent opinion. The main innovation is to measure constituent opinion using referendum election returns. In a sample of 3,983 roll-call votes on 31 laws in nine states, I find that legislator...

It is common in research on representation to estimate a variable called “responsiveness,” the correlation between policy outcomes and public opinion. Responsiveness so measured is a necessary feature of representation, but theoretical research has shown that there is no logical basis for...

Do voters see democracy entirely as a game of self-interest in which one person’s gain is another’s loss, or do they also view it as a search for the common good, as some democracy theorists have long conjectured? Existing empirical research that assumes entirely private interests cannot...