This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

This paper examines the origins of investor protection under the common law by analysing the development of shareholder protection in Victorian Britain, the home of the common law. In this era, very little was codified, with corporate law simply suggesting a default template of rules....

"Say on pay" gives shareholders an advisory vote on a company's pay practices for its top executives. Beginning in 2011, Dodd-Frank mandated such votes at public companies. The first year of "say on pay" under the new legislation may have changed the dialogue and give-and-take in the...

The forthright brand of shareholder activism hedge funds deploy emerged by the mid-2000s as a major corporate governance phenomenon. This paper explains the rise of hedge fund activism and offers predictions about future developments. The paper begins by distinguishing the “offensive” form...

Modern perceptions of good corporate governance assume that the general meeting has a meaningful role in the governance of listed companies and that shareholders make responsible use of their voting rights. Assessments after the financial crisis, however, indicate that institutional investors by...

This paper formally investigates the optimal allocation of power for shareholders recognizing that they may be heterogeneous, and that agency problems exist with managers. In the model I treat shareholders as economic actors who choose decision rules (or the degree of shareholder power) under a...

Corporate stewardship holds great promise for the improvement of shareholder engagement and the encouragement of more responsible and long-term oriented value creation. Many countries have now adopted a best practice code for the stewardship role of institutional investors and asset managers,...

‘Shareholder rights' are the legal entitlements of shareholders via-a-vis companies in which they invest. A large body of research has sought to investigate how shareholder rights foster accountability of controllers. The concern has been that without accountability, managers and dominant...

We study a regulatory change that permitted shareholder proposals to instate proxy access. It generated over 300 proposals and led more than 250 firms to adopt proxy access from 2012 to 2016. The firms expected to benefit most from proxy access have the most positive market reaction to receiving...