Faculty and Staff Kudos

Jian Huang, Ph.D. and  Bharat A. Jain, Ph.D. (Finance) have a paper forthcoming in Journal of Business Research. It is joint work with Gokhan Torna.  In this paper, the authors examine corporate policy decisions made in anticipation of and subsequent to a proxy contest. The results suggest that managers increase dividend payouts and leverage and decrease acquisition spending in the year prior to the proxy contest when they anticipate that dissidents may prevail in the contest. Overall, the results suggest that proxy contests play a disciplinary role only when incumbents anticipate a loss in the contest and are therefore forced to pursue policy choices preferred by dissidents.