Editor's Note: The following post comes to us from Yonca Ertimur of the Accounting Division at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Fabrizio Ferri of the Accounting Division at Columbia University; and David Oesch of the Department of Financial Accounting at the University of Zurich.

In the paper Understanding Director Elections: Determinants and Consequences, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we provide an in-depth examination of uncontested director elections. Using a hand-collected and comprehensive sample for director elections held at S&P 500 firms over the 2003–2010 period, we examine the factors driving shareholder votes in uncontested director elections, the effect of these votes on firms’ actions and the impact of these actions on firm value. We make three contributions.

First, it is well known that recommendations by the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) play a key role in determining the voting outcome. Yet, the question of what factors drive ISS recommendations and, thus, shareholder votes in uncontested director elections remains largely unanswered. To fill this gap, we use the reports ISS releases to its clients ahead of the annual meeting and identify the specific reasons underlying negative ISS recommendations. We find that 38.1% of the negative recommendations target individual directors (reflecting concerns with independence, meeting attendance and number of directorships), 28.6% target an entire committee (usually the compensation committee), and the remaining 33.3% target the entire board (mostly for lack of responsiveness to shareholder proposals receiving a majority vote in the past). A withhold recommendation by ISS is associated with about 20% more votes withheld, in line with prior research. More relevant to our study, there is substantial variation in votes withheld from directors conditional on the underlying reason. A board-level ISS withhold recommendation is associated with 25.48% more votes withheld, versus 19.73% and 16.44%, respectively, for committee- and individual-level withhold recommendations. The sensitivity of shareholder votes to ISS withhold recommendations is higher when there are multiple reasons underlying the withhold recommendation for the director (a proxy for more severe concerns) and at firms with poorer governance structures. These results suggest that shareholders do not blindly follow ISS recommendations but seem to take into account their rationale, their severity and other contextual factors (e.g. governance of the firm). However, cases of high votes withheld without a negative proxy advisor recommendation are rare, suggesting that voting shareholders only focus on the issues singled out by proxy advisors, potentially at the expense of other value-relevant factors (e.g. directors’ skill set, expertise and experience) for which proxy advisors have not (yet) developed voting guidelines (perhaps due to lack of sophistication or the inherent complexity of the issue).

Click here to read the complete post...

" /> Editor's Note: The following post comes to us from Yonca Ertimur of the Accounting Division at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Fabrizio Ferri of the Accounting Division at Columbia University; and David Oesch of the Department of Financial Accounting at the University of Zurich.

In the paper Understanding Director Elections: Determinants and Consequences, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we provide an in-depth examination of uncontested director elections. Using a hand-collected and comprehensive sample for director elections held at S&P 500 firms over the 2003–2010 period, we examine the factors driving shareholder votes in uncontested director elections, the effect of these votes on firms’ actions and the impact of these actions on firm value. We make three contributions.

First, it is well known that recommendations by the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) play a key role in determining the voting outcome. Yet, the question of what factors drive ISS recommendations and, thus, shareholder votes in uncontested director elections remains largely unanswered. To fill this gap, we use the reports ISS releases to its clients ahead of the annual meeting and identify the specific reasons underlying negative ISS recommendations. We find that 38.1% of the negative recommendations target individual directors (reflecting concerns with independence, meeting attendance and number of directorships), 28.6% target an entire committee (usually the compensation committee), and the remaining 33.3% target the entire board (mostly for lack of responsiveness to shareholder proposals receiving a majority vote in the past). A withhold recommendation by ISS is associated with about 20% more votes withheld, in line with prior research. More relevant to our study, there is substantial variation in votes withheld from directors conditional on the underlying reason. A board-level ISS withhold recommendation is associated with 25.48% more votes withheld, versus 19.73% and 16.44%, respectively, for committee- and individual-level withhold recommendations. The sensitivity of shareholder votes to ISS withhold recommendations is higher when there are multiple reasons underlying the withhold recommendation for the director (a proxy for more severe concerns) and at firms with poorer governance structures. These results suggest that shareholders do not blindly follow ISS recommendations but seem to take into account their rationale, their severity and other contextual factors (e.g. governance of the firm). However, cases of high votes withheld without a negative proxy advisor recommendation are rare, suggesting that voting shareholders only focus on the issues singled out by proxy advisors, potentially at the expense of other value-relevant factors (e.g. directors’ skill set, expertise and experience) for which proxy advisors have not (yet) developed voting guidelines (perhaps due to lack of sophistication or the inherent complexity of the issue).

Click here to read the complete post...

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Understanding Director Elections

The following post comes to us from Yonca Ertimur of the Accounting Division at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Fabrizio Ferri of the Accounting Division at Columbia University; and David Oesch of the Department of Financial Accounting at the University of Zurich.

In the paper Understanding Director Elections: Determinants and Consequences, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we provide an in-depth examination of uncontested director elections. Using a hand-collected and comprehensive sample for director elections held at S&P 500 firms over the 2003–2010 period, we examine the factors driving shareholder votes in uncontested director elections, the effect of these votes on firms’ actions and the impact of these actions on firm value. We make three contributions.

First, it is well known that recommendations by the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) play a key role in determining the voting outcome. Yet, the question of what factors drive ISS recommendations and, thus, shareholder votes in uncontested director elections remains largely unanswered. To fill this gap, we use the reports ISS releases to its clients ahead of the annual meeting and identify the specific reasons underlying negative ISS recommendations. We find that 38.1% of the negative recommendations target individual directors (reflecting concerns with independence, meeting attendance and number of directorships), 28.6% target an entire committee (usually the compensation committee), and the remaining 33.3% target the entire board (mostly for lack of responsiveness to shareholder proposals receiving a majority vote in the past). A withhold recommendation by ISS is associated with about 20% more votes withheld, in line with prior research. More relevant to our study, there is substantial variation in votes withheld from directors conditional on the underlying reason. A board-level ISS withhold recommendation is associated with 25.48% more votes withheld, versus 19.73% and 16.44%, respectively, for committee- and individual-level withhold recommendations. The sensitivity of shareholder votes to ISS withhold recommendations is higher when there are multiple reasons underlying the withhold recommendation for the director (a proxy for more severe concerns) and at firms with poorer governance structures. These results suggest that shareholders do not blindly follow ISS recommendations but seem to take into account their rationale, their severity and other contextual factors (e.g. governance of the firm). However, cases of high votes withheld without a negative proxy advisor recommendation are rare, suggesting that voting shareholders only focus on the issues singled out by proxy advisors, potentially at the expense of other value-relevant factors (e.g. directors’ skill set, expertise and experience) for which proxy advisors have not (yet) developed voting guidelines (perhaps due to lack of sophistication or the inherent complexity of the issue).

Second, while previous studies find that shareholder votes at director elections are associated with subsequent firm-level outcomes, it is not clear whether these outcomes are a response to the negative votes or result from omitted factors correlated with negative votes (e.g. behind-the-scene pressure from large institutional investors). We take a more direct approach and examine the actions firms take in response to the specific concerns underlying the negative vote, relying on the ISS reports to identify such concerns. Using this hand-collected data, we estimate firms’ responsiveness to shareholder votes and examine the determinants of responsiveness. In doing so, we provide the first comprehensive evidence on the direct effect of director elections on firms’ governance practices.

Overall, the estimated rate of responsiveness ranges between 39.0% and 47.7%, a remarkable finding given that votes withheld rarely exceed 50%. The rate of responsiveness varies significantly across individual-, committee- and board-level recommendations, as well as within each category. Notably, firms respond to 48.9% of the withhold recommendations arising from lack of responsiveness to majority-vote shareholder proposals. By definition, these are firms that ignored a shareholder proposal supported by a majority vote in the past and yet implement it in response to a (less than 50%) withhold vote, highlighting the greater effectiveness of a vote cast directly against directors themselves. In multivariate analysis, we examine responsiveness to the most frequent type of withhold recommendation in each category, focusing on (i) turnover on key committees, (ii) changes in abnormal CEO pay and (iii) the likelihood of declassifying the board. Across all three tests, we find a statistically and economically significant association between the withhold recommendation and the subsequent governance change addressing the underlying issue. While establishing causality in our setting remains difficult, overall our analyses suggest that the documented governance changes are a direct response to the votes withheld. In addition, our evidence on firms’ responsiveness provides an explanation for why higher votes withheld are generally not associated with subsequent director turnover. Shareholders use their votes on uncontested director elections to get directors to address specific problems, rather than to vote them off the board.

Finally, we examine the performance consequences of firms’ responsiveness to votes withheld, thereby speaking to the broader question of the valuation effects of greater shareholder involvement in corporate governance. We find that firms are more likely to respond when shareholder pressure (proxied for by the percentage of votes withheld and the number of withhold recommendations) is higher and when performance is lower. However, we fail to find a difference in subsequent operating and stock performance between responsive and non-responsive firms, even in the most severe cases (e.g., board-level recommendations, high votes withheld). One explanation for these findings is that the items proxy advisors and voting shareholders focus on have little effect on firm value, consistent with the claim that activists misdirect their efforts towards “symbolic” governance issues (Kahan and Rock, 2014).

The full paper is available for download here.

 

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