In 2012, the New York Stock Exchange changed its policies to prevent brokers voting shares on corporate governance proposals where they had not received instructions from beneficial owners. Although the change was intended to protect investors and improve corporate governance, it has had the...

Shareholders exert significant influence on the social and environmental behavior of U.S. corporations through their votes on social responsibility resolutions. However, the outcomes of many social responsibility resolutions are distorted, because the largest shareholders – institutional...

We seek to contribute to understanding index fund stewardship by providing a comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and policy analysis of such stewardship. We put forward an agency-cost theory of the stewardship decisions that index fund managers make. Our agency-costs analysis shows that index...

Perhaps the most important corporate law debate over the last several years concerns whether directors and executives should manage the corporation to maximize value for investors, or also take into account the interests of other stakeholders, or society. But, do investors themselves wish to...

This paper argues that the key mechanisms protecting retail investors' financial stake in their portfolio investments are indirect. They do not rely on actions by the investors or by any private actor directly charged with looking after investors' interests. Rather, they are provided by the...

It is generally assumed that trade retaliation under the WTO performs some kind of 'rebalancing' by allowing the injured Member to suspend 'concessions and obligations' vis-à-vis the violating Member of a level equivalent to the level of 'nullification and impairment' suffered by the injured...

The "antidirector rights index" has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in over a hundred articles since it was introduced by La Porta et al. ("Law and Finance." 1998, Journal of Political Economy 106:1113--55). A thorough reexamination of the legal data, however, leads to...

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common-law and civil-law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper finds no systematic differences between common- and civil-law countries in the complexity,...