We investigate the relative importance of the twenty-four provisions followed by the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) and included in the Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick governance index (Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick 2003). We put forward an entrenchment index based on six provisions: staggered boards, limits to shareholder bylaw amendments, poison pills, golden parachutes, and supermajority requirements for mergers and charter amendments. We find that increases in the index level are monotonically associated with economically significant reductions in firm valuation as well as large negative abnormal returns during the 1990–2003 period. The other eighteen IRRC provisions not in our entrenchment index were uncorrelated with either reduced firm valuation or negative abnormal returns.

Cohen and Wang (2013) (CW2013) provide evidence consistent with market participants perceiving staggered boards to be value reducing. Amihud and Stoyanov (2016) (AS2016) contests these findings, reporting some specifications under which the results are not statistically significant. We show that the results retain their significance under a wide array of robustness tests that address the concerns expressed by AS2016. Our empirical findings reinforce the conclusions of CW2013.

We study the circumstances under which public pressure affects judging. We show that crowd pressure biases decisions in favor of the crowd for “subjective decisions” with respect to which the judge has more discretion but not for “objective decisions.” The bias is strengthened after a judge's error against the crowd and when errors are costlier to the crowd. We use data about referees' decisions and errors from the Bundesliga. We exploit three regimes where, due to the introduction of Video Assistance Refereeing (VAR) and COVID-19, both crowd pressure and the likelihood of errors vary.

Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs on executive incentives. However, we also find that firms that adopt GPs experience negative abnormal stock returns both during and subsequent to the period surrounding their adoption. This finding raises the possibility that even though GPs facilitate some value-increasing acquisitions, they do have, on average, an overall negative effect on shareholder wealth; this effect could be due to GPs weakening the force of the market for control and thereby increasing managerial slack, and/or to GPs making it attractive for executives to go along with some value-decreasing acquisitions that do not serve shareholders' long-term interests. Our findings have significant implications for ongoing debates on GPs and suggest the need for additional work identifying the types of GPs that drive the identified correlation between GPs and reduced shareholder value.