Shareholder voting on corporate acquisitions is controversial. In most countries acquisition decisions are delegated to boards and shareholder approval is discretionary, which makes existing empirical studies inconclusive. We study the U.K. setting where shareholder approval is imposed exogenously via a threshold test that provides strong identification. U.K.
shareholders gain 8 cents per dollar at announcement with mandatory voting, or $13.6 billion over 1992-2010 in aggregate; without voting U.K. shareholders lost $3 billion. Multidimensional regression discontinuity analysis supports a causal interpretation. The evidence suggests that mandatory voting imposes a binding constraint on acquirer CEOs.
Using natural language processing, we identify and categorize the corporate goals in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United...
A common argument against divestment is that it jettisons voting power and that it has a small effect on stock prices. We argue that divestment is a form of...
Corporate governance may be on the verge of entering a new stage. After the managerialism that dominated the view of the corporation into the 1970s and the...