Shareholders' voting rights are supposed to be a fundamental asset, giving shareholders a say in the most important corporate decisions. However, institutional investors had seldom used theirs as they are rationally apathetic; it made more sense for them to sell their stocks when a company is...

Shareholder activism is at the heart of the corporate governance debate. This study investigates shareholder activism through the voting turnout as well as the voting behavior of large and small shareholders and the resolutions voted at annual general meetings (AGMs) of Belgian listed...

The law relating to shareholders' meetings is almost invariably built on the so-called “Efficient Market Hypothesis” (EMH) – i.e.: on the assumptions of rational operators (shareholders, directors etc.), perfect information and no transaction costs. Under EMH all operators select, within...

While staggered boards have been documented to be negatively correlated with firm valuation, such association might be due to staggered boards either bringing about lower firm value or merely reflecting the tendency of low-value firms to have staggered boards. In this paper, we use two natural...

The role and position of shareholders within a listed public company has been a subject of debate on both the national and the international level for decades. This debate focuses primarily on the rights that are, or perhaps, should be conferred upon shareholders in such a company and,...

We find that annual shareholder meetings conducted online can significantly increase the participation of shareholders, especially minority shareholders. This finding is more evident when the cost of physically attending the annual meeting is higher, and when the firm's ownership is more...

We examine investors' perceptions of shareholder activism via voting. To identify instances of activism via voting, we focus on annual meetings with at least one ballot item where a substantial fraction of shareholders is expected to vote against management's voting recommendation, indicating an...

Voting in shareholder meetings has become a popular mechanism of corporate governance throughout the world, and shareholders' main tool for communicating with the company's management. A variety of factors have been shown in the behavioral economic literature to affect voters' behavior,...

This paper tests whether very diversified and patient investors, also known as universal owners, tend to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions instructing corporations to reduce or communicate on the negative externalities they produce. Our sample includes 213 US fund families that voted on...

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...