New evidence on the effectiveness of the proxy mechanism

Michael Fleming

No 9503, Research Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: The proxy fight literature to date has focused exclusively on proxy fights that progress to a shareholder vote or near-shareholder vote stage. In contrast, this paper uses a sampling methodology which retains all cases where a proxy fight is threatened, whether or not a vote eventually occurs. Less than one half of threatened proxy fights ultimately result in a shareholder vote. Votes are avoided in three-fourths of dropped contests when the target firm agrees to be acquired, reaches a settlement with the dissident, or restructures to the dissident' s satisfaction. These avoided contests are associated with significant increases in target firm value, comparable to the increases observed when contests end with a shareholder vote. The increases in firm value are found to be highly concentrated among firms which are acquired subsequent to a threatened proxy fight, providing evidence that the threat of a proxy fight is most effective as a means of forcing the sale of target firms.

Keywords: Stock - Prices; Consolidation and merger of corporations; Corporations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/rese ... arch_papers/9503.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/rese ... rch_papers/9503.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednrp:9503

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Paper from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().