Voting Rationales
3 Oct 2023
13:00 -14:15
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: Members of the University of Cambridge
Castle Teaching Room (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Finance seminar
Speaker: Dr Silvina Rubio, University of Bristol Business School
About the seminar topic
We examine why institutional investors vote the way they vote on director elections, using a novel dataset on voting rationales provided by institutional investors. We find that the most important reasons for opposing directors are board independence, board diversity, tenure, firm governance, and busyness; institutional investors are also increasingly voting against directors to hold them accountable for failure to address environmental and social issues.
We find that institutional investors’ concerns are well-grounded: companies with low board gender diversity receive more rationales on board diversity, similar for companies with long director tenure and busy directors. This is consistent with institutional investors devoting significant effort toward governance research. Finally, companies with high dissent voting related to board diversity, tenure, and busyness improve their board composition in the following year.
Our results suggest that directors are willing to address concerns that result in high shareholder dissent, and voting rationales can be an effective tool to communicate the source of dissent.
Speaker bio
Silvina Rubio has been a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Finance at the University of Bristol Business School since September 2018. She completed her PhD at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in July 2018. Silvina’s research interest include empirical corporate finance, corporate governance and banking.
Register
If you would like to register, or know more about this event, please email Emily Brown.