We show that close votes on shareholder proposals are disproportionately more likely to be won by management than by shareholder activists. Using a sample of shareholder proposals from 2003 to 2016, we uncover a large and discontinuous drop in the density of voting results at the 50% threshold. We document similar patterns for say on pay votes and director elections. Our findings imply that shareholder influence through voting is limited by managerial opposition. It also follows that one cannot routinely use an RDD to identify the causal effects of changes in corporate governance generated by shareholder votes. Received May 29, 2017; editorial decision August 21, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

Firms consider wages, current and expected productivity, as well as firing and hiring costs when firing a worker. Financing constraints distort this intertemporal trade-off, leading firms to sub-optimally fire short-tenured workers with high future expected productivity. We provide empirical evidence of this distortion using matched employer-employee data from the Swedish population between 2000 and 2010. We propose a new empirical strategy that uses credit ratings to identify financing constraints and uses exchange rates and trade data to identify demand shocks. Our empirical results identify an important new misallocation effect of financial frictions that operates within firms across different types of workers.