We investigate an emerging pay-performance activism under a natural setting of performance-focused shareholder proposals rule (PSPs) (Rule 14a-8) established by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for top management compensation. We find that: (1) PSP sponsors successfully identify...

In this paper, we develop a corporate accessibility measure for publicly listed firms in China based on their responses to outside market participants' attempts to communicate with them (via telephone, e-mail, and online discussion forum), and examine whether the provision of corporate...

Using the staggered adoption of universal demand (UD) laws in the United States, we show that the reduction in shareholder litigation risk deteriorates firms' stock price informativeness. This reduction in stock price informativeness is due to firms changing the way they invest rather than...

We examine the influence of proxy advisors on firms’ shareholder engagement behavior. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using Say-On-Pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers a review of engagement activities by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Firms receiving...

The subprime crisis led to a wave of government interventions in the private sector that has been particularly strong in Europe and Latin America, where several governments are large shareholders in a variety of public firms. In a sense, the subprime crisis induced these governments to behave as...

Purpose: This study explores the probability of expropriation of minority shareholders by controlling shareholders in the form of CEO compensation under an imperfect governance institution by using a novel Chinese dataset over 2001-2010.Design/methodology/approach: We use a direct method to...

This study examines the relation between the magnitude of an institution's stock ownership and its tendency to support management through the “Say-On-Pay” (SOP) executive compensation vote. We find that an institutional investor is more likely to oppose management on the SOP vote for...

Institutional investors are highly dissatisfied with the quality of information that they receive about corporate governance policies and practices in the annual proxy. Across the board, they want proxies to be shorter, more concise, more candid, and less legal. The largest complaint involves...

We investigate how mutual funds with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives vote on shareholder proposals related to executive compensation. Using a sample of 94,695 votes by 2,354 mutual funds from 2012 to 2021, we find that ESG funds are 9.4% more likely than non-ESG funds to...

Say on pay is an important regulatory innovation in the area of executive remuneration, traditionally dominated by disclosure based approaches. In this paper I present a model of the regulatory framework for say on pay as it operates in Australia and the UK. Based on the concept of regulatory...