Online voting and minority shareholders' information acquisition: Evidence from a mandatory reform in China

In this study, we examine whether technology-enabled governance promotes minority shareholders' information acquisition by lowering their governance participation costs. Exploiting China's 2014 online voting mandate, which requires all listed firms to provide online voting access for shareholder meetings, we find that treated firms—those that had not provided such access prior to the mandate—experience a significant post-adoption increase in minority shareholders' pre-meeting information acquisition. This effect is stronger for firms with a larger minority shareholder base, greater expropriation risk, and higher managerial perk consumption. Minority shareholders' increased information acquisition is concentrated in firm-specific inquiries, but not in industry- or market-level inquiries. Furthermore, managerial replies become more responsive to investor inquiries, as evidenced by greater textual similarity in question–answer pairs. In support of investors' incorporation of acquired information into investment decisions, we find that treated firms exhibit lower stock price synchronicity and greater retail trading during the pre-meeting window after the mandate. Finally, minority shareholders are more likely to vote against proposals that plausibly hurt their interests, and such dissent elicits significantly negative market reactions, suggesting more informed voting and more effective minority shareholder governance. By linking technology-enabled governance to ex ante information acquisition, our study extends the literature on shareholder voting and the role of technology in capital markets.