Konstantinos E. Zachariadis is Associate Professor at the Queen Mary University of London. This post is based on a recent paper by Professor Zachariadis; Dragana Cvijanovic, Assistant Professor of Finance at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School; and Moqi Groen-Xu, Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics.
As Kahan & Rock (2007) note “Never has voting been more important in corporate law”. Participation in corporate voting is the main mechanism via which most shareholders voice their opinion and affect management. As part of a general rise in attention to shareholder voting and shareholder activism, regulators have called for greater participation to ensure more representative voting results and better monitoring. However, conventional wisdom questions the usefulness of such requests. Do shareholders vote—unless they own large blocks or they are legally required to vote? There is little guidance, theoretical or empirical, to this discussion. Our paper offers the first comprehensive study of voting participation by shareholders.
