The Finance Brown Bag Seminar is held by the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance (WU Vienna) and the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (VGSF). It serves as a presentation platform for PhD students, faculty members, and visitors. An overview of BBS on the website of the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance.
—————-
Markus Parlasca, WU Vienna
(joint with Paul Voss)
Voting and Trading on Proxy Advice
This paper studies how proxy advice affects corporate decision-making when shareholders can vote and trade. Because proxy advice correlates shareholders’ votes, it is informative about the vote outcome. We show that the predictability of the vote outcome induces shareholders with conflicting information vis-à-vis the proxy advice to sell their shares – precisely when their vote would be most valuable for information aggregation. We find that proxy advice can thus reduce firm value and more precise proxy advice may not improve corporate decision making. Our results give rise to new empirical predictions and have implications for regulation.
