Abstract: We causally estimate the value of shareholders’ access to corporate ballots. Managers can ask the Securities and Exchange Commission to exclude shareholder proposals before investors vote. We exploit rotational assignment to SEC officials who differ in their willingness to permit ballot access for instrumentation. For proposals whose access depends on the assigned official, reaching the ballot reduces equity value by 1.19% at the SEC decision announcement. Losses concentrate in environmental and social proposals at 2.56%, while governance proposals show no statistically detectable effect, even at firms with entrenched management. Expanding ballot access can therefore impose financial costs at the margin of shareholder control.  Download

With: Florian Berg, Juan Palacios, Roberto Rigobon, and Siqi Zheng