We measure the impact of “say on pay” (SoP) – mandatory shareholder votes on top-management compensation – on the market value of voting rights. By exploiting the staggered introduction of SoP across 14 economies, we show that SoP does not automatically increase the value of shareholder voting rights. While stricter, binding SoP reforms increase voting values, looser advisory SoP laws decrease them. Firms that do not pay their CEOs excessively experience the largest decreases in voting values. Voting values also reflect a country’s level of investor protection, past dissent in SoP ballots, and dynamically adjust to changes in managerial compensation.

This paper proposes and tests a new method to extract the value of corporate voting rights from market prices of American-style single-stock options. The method models voting-right values as non-cash dividends and backs them out via numerical optimization from prices of equity options. Simulation experiments show that the method is accurate and outperforms existing option-based approaches by reducing their measurement error from 17.2% to 1.57% in terms of root mean squared errors and almost eliminates their bias. The paper also contributes an empirical analysis of corporate voting-right values in European companies in the time period between 2003 and 2010. Voting rights have an annualized average value of 0.37% of the share price and are significantly worth more in months in which either ordinary or extraordinary general meetings take place but no single shareholder holds a majority stake in the company. Finally, voting values are higher in companies incorporated in French-civil-law countries (France and the Netherlands) than in German-civil-law countries (Germany and Switzerland).