Many companies in Germany must provide information beyond financial figures in their annual reports. For some years now, legislators have increasingly required information on non-financial aspects, such as the shares of women in leadership positions. Using a quantitative text analysis of annual...

Early empirical studies find a negative association between firm performance and shareholder activism, whereas more recent studies document a positive association. We argue and theoretically show that this change in behavior results from mandating executive compensation disclosure. We develop a...

There are several measures of equity compensation that may provide shareholders with distinct and useful information for evaluating CEO pay. We examine whether shareholders consider additional disclosures of equity compensation measures beyond the grant date fair value when participating in...

Beginning in 2018, U.S. public firms were required to report the ratio of the chief executive officer's (CEO) compensation to their median employee's compensation in the annual proxy statement. We find that this pay ratio disclosure leads to declines in both total compensation and...

We examine the influence of proxy advisors on firms’ shareholder engagement behavior. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using Say-On-Pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers a review of engagement activities by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Firms receiving...

We examine the efficacy of proxy voting to limit inflated CEO pay. We find that the percentage of dissenting votes that go against director-sponsored compensation proposals increases following a staggered rejection of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (RIDD), which increases CEOs’ job...

Understanding CEO compensation plans is a continuing challenge for directors and investors. The disclosure of these plans is dictated by SEC rules that rely heavily on the “fair value” of awards at the time they are granted. The problem with these numbers is that they are static and do not...

In many advanced countries, most outside directors are executives, active or retired, at other firms; in other words, executives from other companies make executive compensation decisions. This situation may hinder the board of directors (BOD) in their efforts to optimize executive compensation...

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between some aspects of governance (such as ownership structure and characteristics of the board), the efficiency of intellectual capital and the economic and market performance of a sample of Italian listed companies....

Prior literature shows that financial disclosures and corporate governance both impact firm performance. This paper documents an important topic that has been overlooked in the prior literature, their joint effect, because the two mechanisms could be independent, substitutive, or complementary...