How Management Manipulates Voting on Its Own Proposals

By Ilona Babenko, Goeun Choi and Rik Sen June 21, 2018 by renholding

Shareholders can generally affect the decisions of companies in two ways: through voice (voting) and through exit (selling their shares). In a new paper, “Management (of) proposals,” we use shareholder voting records on management proposals from 2003 to …

Institutional Investor Voting Behavior: A Network Theory Perspective

By Luca Enriques and Sandro Romano May 17, 2018 by renholding

It is received wisdom that institutional investors have insufficient incentives to cast informed votes because they compete on relative performance. If BlackRock invests in the monitoring of one of its portfolio companies, it will become relatively less competitive vis-à-vis the …

Sticking Around Too Long? Dynamics of the Benefits of Dual-Class Structures

By Hyunseob Kim and Roni Michaely April 12, 2018 by renholding

Lawyers and academics generally have a dim view of dual-class share structures. When Snap Inc., a technology-based social media company, was preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) in early 2017, for example, CalPERS and many other prominent institutional investors …

Perpetual Dual-Class Stock: The Case Against Corporate Royalty

By Robert J. Jackson, Jr. February 16, 2018 by renholding

My first few weeks at the Securities and Exchange Commission have been a whirlwind—and just to be clear, I am not talking about the markets.[1] In a few short weeks, I have gotten a crash course on SEC policymaking—and

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Proxy Delivery Methods Show How Managers Rely on the Retail Shareholder Vote

By Choonsik Lee and Matthew E. Souther May 29, 2017 by renholding

Previous research on shareholder voting has placed most of the emphasis on the role of institutional shareholders. In our recent study, however, we provide evidence that managers strategically rely on the support offered by retail shareholders to ensure that their …

How Institutional Cross-Ownership Can Improve Corporate Governance

By Jie (Jack) He, Jiekun Huang and Shan Zhao April 18, 2017 by renholding

A corporation’s governance structure does not exist in a vacuum: It can impose externalities on other firms. The existing literature has argued that those externalities can arise because companies interact with each other through various types of relationships. For example, …

Offloading the Burden of Being Public: An Analysis of Multiple Voting Share Structures

By Anita Anand March 8, 2016 by ilyabeylin

Many large firms – Google, Alibaba and Fitbit to name a few — have multiple voting share structures (MVS) in which the firm issues two or more classes of shares, one to the public and the other to insiders (typically …

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