This paper provides evidence that uncontested director elections provide informative polls of investor perceptions regarding board performance. We find that higher (lower) vote approval is associated with lower (higher) stock price reactions to subsequent announcements of management turnovers. In addition, firms with low vote approval are more likely to experience CEO turnover, greater board turnover, lower CEO compensation, fewer and better-received acquisitions, and more and better-received divestitures in the future. These findings hold after controlling for other variables reflecting or determining investor perceptions, suggesting that elections not only inform as a summary statistic, but incrementally inform as well.

We propose a new measure of readability, the Bog Index, which captures the plain English attributes of disclosure (e.g., active voice, fewer hidden verbs, etc.). We validate this measure using a series of controlled experiments and an archival-based regulatory intervention to prospectus filing readability. We also demonstrate the importance of understanding the underlying drivers of quantity-based measures of readability. In particular, we caution researchers that a vast amount of the variation in Form 10-K file size over time is driven by the inclusion of content unrelated to the underlying text in the 10-K (e.g., HTML, XML, PDFs).