Evasive Shareholder Meetings / David Yermack, Yuanzhi Li.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Yermack, David.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Li, Yuanzhi.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w19991.

NBER working paper series no. w19991

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

We study the location and timing of annual shareholder meetings. When companies move their annual meetings a great distance from headquarters, they tend to announce disappointing earnings results and experience pronounced stock market underperformance in the months after the meeting. Companies appear to schedule meetings in remote locations when the managers have private, adverse information about future performance and wish to discourage scrutiny by shareholders, activists, and the media. However, shareholders do not appear to decode this signal, since the disclosure of meeting locations leads to little immediate stock price reaction. We find that voter participation drops when meetings are held at unusual hours, even though most voting is done electronically during a period of weeks before the meeting convenes.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2014.