IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/1964.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Strategic Proxy Voting

Author

Listed:
  • Matvos, Gregor

    (Harvard U)

  • Ostrovsky, Michael

    (Stanford U)

Abstract

Despite its importance, voting in the elections of corporate boards of directors remains relatively unexplored in the empirical literature. We construct a comprehensive dataset of 3,204,890 mutual fund votes in director elections that took place between July 2003 and June 2005. We find substantial systematic heterogeneity in fund voting patterns: some mutual funds are management friendly, and others are less so. We construct and estimate a model of voting in which mutual funds impose externalities on each other: the cost of opposing management decreases when other funds oppose it as well. We exploit fund heterogeneity to overcome the endogeneity problem induced by unobserved firm quality. We estimate all parameters in the voting model and show that strategic interaction between funds is economically and statistically significant. We then construct counterfactuals to compute the equilibrium distribution of votes under alternative specifications of strategic externalities. We use the counterfactuals to show that implementing confidential voting in board of director elections has potentially large consequences on the equilibrium number of funds withholding their votes from directors.

Suggested Citation

  • Matvos, Gregor & Ostrovsky, Michael, 2006. "Strategic Proxy Voting," Research Papers 1964, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1964
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP1964.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Matvos, Gregor & Ostrovsky, Michael, 2008. "Cross-ownership, returns, and voting in mergers," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(3), pages 391-403, September.
    2. Van Zandt, Timothy & Vives, Xavier, 2007. "Monotone equilibria in Bayesian games of strategic complementarities," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 339-360, May.
    3. Roberta Romano, 2002. "Does Confidential Proxy Voting Matter?," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm300, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Feb 2003.
    4. Brown, Stephen J. & Goetzmann, William N., 1997. "Mutual fund styles," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 373-399, March.
    5. Paul Gompers & Joy Ishii & Andrew Metrick, 2003. "Corporate Governance and Equity Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 107-156.
    6. Malmendier, Ulrike & Tate, Geoffrey, 2008. "Who makes acquisitions? CEO overconfidence and the market's reaction," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(1), pages 20-43, July.
    7. Charles F. Manski, 1993. "Identification of Endogenous Social Effects: The Reflection Problem," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 60(3), pages 531-542.
    8. Benjamin E. Hermalin & Michael S. Weisbach, 2003. "Boards of directors as an endogenously determined institution: a survey of the economic literature," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 9(Apr), pages 7-26.
    9. Marianne Bertrand & Antoinette Schoar, 2003. "Managing with Style: The Effect of Managers on Firm Policies," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(4), pages 1169-1208.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Matvos, Gregor & Ostrovsky, Michael, 2010. "Heterogeneity and peer effects in mutual fund proxy voting," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 98(1), pages 90-112, October.
    2. Lauren Cohen & Andrea Frazzini & Christopher J. Malloy, 2012. "Hiring Cheerleaders: Board Appointments of "Independent" Directors," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(6), pages 1039-1058, June.
    3. Randy Beavers & Shawn Mobbs, 2020. "Director overconfidence," Financial Management, Financial Management Association International, vol. 49(2), pages 389-422, June.
    4. Philipp Krüger & Augustin Landier & David Thesmar, 2015. "The WACC Fallacy: The Real Effects of Using a Unique Discount Rate," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(3), pages 1253-1285, 06.
    5. Huang, Qianqian & Jiang, Feng & Lie, Erik & Yang, Ke, 2014. "The role of investment banker directors in M&A," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(2), pages 269-286.
    6. Renneboog, Luc & Vansteenkiste, Cara, 2019. "Failure and success in mergers and acquisitions," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 650-699.
    7. Li, Xiaoyang & Low, Angie & Makhija, Anil K., 2011. "Career Concerns and the Busy Life of the Young CEO," Working Paper Series 2011-4, Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics.
    8. Bill Francis & Iftekhar Hasan & Jong Chool Park & Qiang Wu, 2015. "Gender Differences in Financial Reporting Decision Making: Evidence from Accounting Conservatism," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 32(3), pages 1285-1318, September.
    9. Otto, Clemens A., 2014. "CEO optimism and incentive compensation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(2), pages 366-404.
    10. Kerstin Lopatta & Thomas Kaspereit & Laura‐Maria Gastone, 2020. "Managerial style in cost asymmetry and shareholder value," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(5), pages 800-826, July.
    11. Datta, Sudip & Doan, Trang & Toscano, Francesca, 2023. "Top executive gender, corporate culture, and the value of corporate cash holdings," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    12. Frye, Melissa B. & Pham, Duong T., 2018. "CEO gender and corporate board structures," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 110-124.
    13. Morgan, Angela & Poulsen, Annette & Wolf, Jack & Yang, Tina, 2011. "Mutual funds as monitors: Evidence from mutual fund voting," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(4), pages 914-928, September.
    14. Li, Xiaoyang & Low, Angie & Makhija, Anil K., 2017. "Career concerns and the busy life of the young CEO," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 88-109.
    15. Panagiotis Karavitis & Pantelis Kazakis & Tianyue Xu, 2022. "CFO Working Experience and Tax Avoidance," Working Papers 2022_14, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    16. Yung, Kenneth & Nguyen, Trung, 2020. "Managerial ability, product market competition, and firm behavior," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 102-116.
    17. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2014_001 is not listed on IDEAS
    18. Carline, Nicholas F. & Linn, Scott C. & Yadav, Pradeep K., 2009. "Operating performance changes associated with corporate mergers and the role of corporate governance," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(10), pages 1829-1841, October.
    19. Jaffe, Jeffrey & Pedersen, David & Voetmann, Torben, 2013. "Skill differences in corporate acquisitions," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 23(C), pages 166-181.
    20. Kravet, Todd D., 2014. "Accounting conservatism and managerial risk-taking: Corporate acquisitions," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(2), pages 218-240.
    21. Seoungpil Ahn & Jaiho Chung, 2015. "Cash holdings, corporate governance, and acquirer returns," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 1(1), pages 1-31, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1964. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.