Corporate Governance Through Voice and Exit

Corporate Governance Through Voice and Exit

Marco Becht, Julian Franks, Hannes Wagner

Series number :

Serial Number: 
633/2019

Date posted :

October 08 2019

Last revised :

November 08 2019
SSRN Share

Keywords

  • asset management • 
  • active ownership • 
  • corporate stewardship • 
  • shareholder monitoring • 
  • shareholder engagement • 
  • analyst research • 
  • institutional investors • 
  • Corporate governance • 
  • voice and exit

How do active managers engage with portfolio firms? And, what role does monitoring and engagement play in their trading decisions? We use proprietary data from a large UK active asset manager with a long-standing commitment to stewardship to answer these questions.

Our sample, based on nine years of daily data, provides a detailed picture of how fund managers’ decisions are influenced by monitoring target firms, especially through private engagements. Internal analysts and a centralised stewardship team monitor the board and management and place portfolio companies on a watch list when there are governance or other concerns. The asset manager engages more intensively with the watch list, abstaining or voting against management proposals in a third of meetings. More intensive engagement and negative votes against are associated with internal analyst downgrades and with exit by fund managers. We provide evidence that monitoring and engagement generate information advantages, which in turn contribute to alpha. Our results provide strong support for voice influencing exit.

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Authors

Professor
Real name:
Marco Becht
Fellow, Research Member, Board Member
Solvay Brussels School for Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles