Traditionally, fund managers cast votes on behalf of investors whose capital they manage. Recently, this system has come under intense debate given the growing concentration of voting power among a few asset managers and disagreements over environmental and social issues. Major fund managers now...

We provide novel evidence on voting practices used by the investment committees of prominent venture capital investors in the U.S. A substantial share of these VCs use a voting rule for seed and early stage investments where a single `champion' is sufficient for the entire partnership to make an...

We analyze how proxy advisors, which sell voting recommendations to shareholders, affect corporate decision-making. If the quality of the advisor's information is low, there is overreliance on its recommendations and insufficient private information production. In contrast, if the advisor's...

The quality of proxy advisors' voting recommendations is important for policymakers and industry participants. We analyze the design of recommendations (available to all market participants) and research reports (available only to subscribers) by a proxy advisor, whose objective is to maximize...

Traditionally, fund managers cast votes on behalf of investors whose capital they manage. Recently, this system has come under intense debate given the growing concentration of voting power among a few asset managers and disagreements over environmental and social issues. Major fund managers now...

Proxy advisory firms have become important players in corporate governance, but the extent of their influence over shareholder votes is debated. We estimate the effect of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) recommendations on voting outcomes by exploiting exogenous variation in ISS...

This paper develops a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium. It explains how and why a voting premium emerges in the absence of takeovers and controlling shareholders. The model features a minority blockholder and dispersed shareholders who trade shares in a competitive...

We study the interplay between a "one person-one vote" political system and a "one share-one vote" corporate governance regime. The political system sets Pigouvian subsidies, while corporate governance determines firm-specific public good investments. Our analysis highlights a two-way feedback...