This paper examines whether -- in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements -- shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms' exposure to climate change risks. We find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate change risks,...

Shareholder activism on sustainability issues has become increasingly prevalent over the years, with the number of proposals filed doubling from 1999 to 2013. We use recent innovations in accounting standard setting to classify 2,665 shareholder proposals that address environmental and social...

Analyzing data from approximately 1.5 million employees across 1,108 established public and private US companies, we find that employee beliefs about their firm's purpose is weaker in public companies. This difference is most pronounced within the salaried middle and hourly ranks, rather than...

We provide fresh evidence regarding the relation between compensation consultants and CEO pay. First, firms that employ consultants have higher-paid CEOs—this result is robust to firm fixed-effects and matching on economic and governance variables. Second, while this relation is partly due to...

We examine the influence of proxy advisors on firms’ shareholder engagement behavior. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using Say-On-Pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers a review of engagement activities by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Firms receiving...