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...

Shareholders' meetings provide links of communication between shareholders and management and enables members to exercise their votes. The law that governs these meetings is, therefore, an important aspect of corporate governance. This paper identifies critical weaknesses in the law on...

We study the strategic scheduling of annual shareholder meetings. When companies move their annual meetings a great distance from headquarters, they tend to experience pronounced stock market underperformance in the six months after the meeting and announce earnings below expectations over the...

This paper analyzes how trading after shareholder meetings changes the composition of the shareholder base. Analyzing daily trades, we find that mutual funds reduce their holdings if their votes are opposed to the voting outcome. Trading volume is high even when stock prices do not change, peaks...

We study the location and timing of annual shareholder meetings. When companies move their annual meetings a great distance from headquarters, they tend to announce disappointing earnings results and experience pronounced stock market underperformance in the months after the meeting. Companies...

This study of annual general meetings (AGMs) is based on an empirical analysis of the meetings held by eleven Colombian firms listed in the local market accounting for just over 50 percent of the COLCAP (an index of the most relevant companies in the market). Referencing the AGM scorecard...

We define annual shareholder meetings as contentious if one or more ballot items are likely to obtain sufficient shareholder votes to induce a firm to implement governance changes. Using a sample of almost 28,000 meetings between 2003 and 2012, we find that abnormal stock returns over the 40-day...

Do institutional investors engage with companies on corporate externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions? And if so, why? We study voting at shareholder meetings by two emblematic global investors: BlackRock, a major asset manager, and the Norway Fund, a responsible sovereign wealth fund....