This paper explores whether investors’ personal experience of climate change affects their voting behavior on environmental issues. We find that fund managers exposed to abnormally hot temperatures are significantly more likely to support environmental proposals. This increased support is...

This paper examines how external governance pressure from the media affects capital structure. Using a comprehensive set of corporate news, we find a negative relation between media coverage and financial leverage. An instrumental variable approach suggests that the effect is causal....

This paper examines the effect of “superstar” CEOs (i.e. CEOs that win prestigious business awards) on the voting behavior in shareholder proposals. We show that the superstar status strongly affects the outcome of shareholder proposals in favor of the management, both compared to all...

Return on Equity (RoE) is a central measure of performance in the banking industry, which is used to allocate capital inside and across divisions. The reliance on this metric emerged from the risk management approach to banking which underlies bank capital regulation. Using the financial crisis,...

This paper analyzes the influence of stakeholder orientation on the design of managerial incentives. Our tests exploit the quasi-natural experiment provided by the staggered adoption of directors' duties laws (i.e., state-level laws that explicitly expand board members' duties to act in the best...

This paper examines the role played by the media in the shareholder proposal process. We find a positive relation between media coverage and the likelihood to be targeted by governance proposals. The effect is mostly concentrated in proposals submitted by non-institutional shareholders and...

This paper studies how leverage affects the interaction between firms and labor unions using data on shareholder proposals. We find a negative association between leverage and both the probability of being targeted by union-sponsored proposals and the number of shareholder proposals submitted by...