Evasive Shareholder Meetings

47 Pages Posted: 24 Mar 2014 Last revised: 15 Feb 2023

See all articles by Lily Y. Li

Lily Y. Li

Villanova University

David Yermack

New York University (NYU) - Stern School of Business

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: March 2014

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.

Suggested Citation

Li, Lily Y. and Yermack, David, Evasive Shareholder Meetings (March 2014). NBER Working Paper No. w19991, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2413339

Lily Y. Li (Contact Author)

Villanova University ( email )

United States

David Yermack

New York University (NYU) - Stern School of Business ( email )

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HOME PAGE: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~dyermack

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