This paper examines the impact of staggered boards on the value of voting rights (i.e., the voting premium) estimated using option prices. We find companies with staggered boards have a higher voting premium. Exploiting plausibly exogenous court rulings, we confirm that weakening the effectiveness of staggered boards decreases the voting premium. Given that the voting premium reflects private benefits consumption and associated managerial inefficiencies, our findings are consistent with the entrenchment view of staggered boards. Analyzing the cross-sectional heterogeneity in our sample, we find the entrenchment effect of staggered boards to be particularly pronounced for firms in noncompetitive industries and for mature firms.

We analyze an extensive proprietary database of corporate social responsibility engagements with U.S. public companies from 1999-2009. Engagements address environmental, social, and governance concerns. Successful (unsuccessful) engagements are followed by positive (zero) abnormal returns. Companies with inferior governance and socially conscious institutional investors are more likely to be engaged. Success in engagements is more probable if the engaged firm has reputational concerns and higher capacity to implement changes. Collaboration among activists is instrumental in increasing the success rate of environmental/social engagements. After successful engagements, particularly on environmental/social issues, companies experience improved accounting performance and governance and increased institutional ownership.

This paper introduces a measure that captures the premium in bond prices that is due to the value of creditor control. We estimate the premium as the difference in the bond price and an equivalent synthetic bond without control rights that is constructed using credit default swap (CDS) contracts. We find empirically that this premium increases as firm credit quality decreases and around important credit events such as defaults, bankruptcies, and covenant violations. The increase is greatest for bonds most pivotal to changes in control. Changes in bond and CDS liquidity do not appear to drive increases in the premium.

We analyze an extensive proprietary database of corporate social responsibility engagements with U.S. public companies from 1999–2009. Engagements address environmental, social, and governance concerns. Successful (unsuccessful) engagements are followed by positive (zero) abnormal returns. Companies with inferior governance and socially conscious institutional investors are more likely to be engaged. Success in engagements is more probable if the engaged firm has reputational concerns and higher capacity to implement changes. Collaboration among activists is instrumental in increasing the success rate of environmental/social engagements. After successful engagements, particularly on environmental/social issues, companies experience improved accounting performance and governance and increased institutional ownership.