This paper studies institutional investors' decision-making using novel data from a major proxy advisor. We highlight the significant role of customized proxy advice in shaping shareholders' voting decisions. About 80% of funds receive customized advice, and custom recommendations differ...

We show that CEO golden parachute contracts are responsive to a tax on golden parachutes, and CEO option exercises are responsive to these contracts. In particular, as a consequence of a tax code provision penalizing parachutes greater than 3 times taxable income, CEO parachute contracts...

We study retail shareholder voting using a detailed and nearly universal sample of anonymizedretail shareholder voting records over the period 2015-2017. Contrary to public perception, wefind that retail shareholders are an influential voting bloc, affecting as many proposal outcomes asthe Big...

Random case assignment is thought to be an important feature of decision-making in federal courts because it helps guard against favoritism (actual or perceived) toward particular parties or types of cases. In bankruptcy courts, cases are randomly assigned to both judges and trustees. In Chapter...

The European Commission has often used its merger-review power to challenge high-profile acquisitions involving non-EU companies, giving rise to concerns that its competition authority has evolved into a powerful tool for industrial policy. The Commission has been accused of deliberately...

In recent decades, investors have wielded their voting power to influence the direction of corporate policy. Although mutual funds have widely varying voting patterns and predictable ideological disagreements, little is known about whether their underlying investors have similar preferences. I...

Closing auction volume is steadily increasing on NYSE and Nasdaq, and now represents over 10% of trading volume. The NYSE closing auction design is highly advantageous to NYSE floor brokers, who have near-exclusive access to the auction from 3:50 pm to 4:00 pm. We show that closing auction...

We show that the PIN and the Duarte and Young (2009) (APIN) models do not match the variability of noise trade in the data and that this limitation has severe implications for how these models identify private information. We examine two alternatives to these models, the Generalized PIN model...

This paper exploits the staggered securities phase-in when the Investors Exchange (IEX) becomes a national securities exchange to study the effects of intentional access delays on market quality including price discovery. IEX introduces exchange trading---and therefore its 350-microsecond speed...