During the last decade, the stratospheric increases in Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pay levels have made executive compensation a popular target for shareholder activism, particularly when high pay is accompanied by poor corporate performance. Outraged investors have made their views know to...

"Say on pay" gives shareholders an advisory vote on a company's pay practices for its top executives. Beginning in 2011, Dodd-Frank mandated such votes at public companies. The first year of "say on pay" under the new legislation may have changed the dialogue and give-and-take in the...

Using voting data from the first year of “say on pay” votes under Dodd-Frank, we look at the patterns of shareholder voting in advisory votes on executive pay. Consistent with the more limited “say on pay” voting before Dodd-Frank, we find that shareholders in the first year under...

Today, some hedge funds attack public companies for the sole purpose of inducing a short-lived panic which they can exploit for profit. This sort of market manipulation harms average investors who entrust financial markets with their retirement savings. While short selling serves a critical...

Early studies of market reaction to stock option plans have found positive increases in stock prices upon the announcement of these plans. However, since in the mid-1990's, shareholders have become increasingly critical of stock option plans, and voted against them in growing numbers. Are...

Over the past decade, executive compensation has become a controversial topic. Increasingly, corporate boards of directors are confronted by angry shareholder groups over the size and composition of executive pay packages. One of the most important focal points for these tensions arises when...

In this paper, we examine changes in financial instruments and institutions by contrasting the successes and failures of institutional shareholder activism during the 1990s with more recent developments in hedge fund activism and the use of financial innovation. We find that although...

We examine how legal standards affect outcomes in shareholder lawsuits where the defendants create Special Litigation Committees (SLCs). We compile a hand-collected sample of SLC associated lawsuits spanning a 26-year period from Jan 1, 1990 through Dec 31, 2015. We produce extensive descriptive...

Fears have abounded for years that the sweet spot for capture of regulatory agencies is the “revolving door” whereby civil servants migrate from their roles as regulators to private industry. Recent scholarship on this topic has examined whether America's watchdog for securities markets, the...