Evasive Shareholder Meetings

David Yermack and Yuanzhi Li

No 19991, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: G34 K22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
Note: CF LE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as in "Journal of Corporate Finance" Volume 38, June 2016, Pages 318-334

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