We find that minority shareholders’ voting opposition to dividend proposals is associated with significantly higher cash dividend payout in the following year for stocks listed in Shanghai Stock Exchange. When minority shareholders’ voting opposition increases, the likelihood and frequency of regulatory penalties increase. The reverse happens after firms increase dividend payout. Minority shareholders’ voting opposition has a stronger positive effect on cash dividend payout when they post more messages in stock forums and when independent directors express dissenting opinions. The effect is weaker if the board chair or CEO has political connections. Minority shareholders’ voting opposition does not have significant effects on the growth rate of earnings and the level of earnings management. But we do find evidence that minority shareholder voting opposition reduces expropriation by major shareholders. The evidence supports a hypothesis that regulators use the minority shareholder voting results to screen out possible cases of shareholder oppression.

We report results from a large, randomized field to study how access to formal microinsurance affects production and economic development. We induce exogenous variation in insurance coverage at the village level by randomly assigning performance incentives to the village animal husbandry worker who is responsible for signing farmers up for the insurance. We find that promoting greater adoption of insurance significantly increases farmers' sow production, and this effect seems to persist in the longer run; moreover, the increase in sow production in response to the sow insurance does not seem to be the result of the substitution of other livestock.