Do Long-Term Institutional Shareholders Always Vote in Favour of Board Recommendations? The Moderating Effect of Cash Holdings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article aims to examine the voting behaviour of long-term institutional shareholders towards board recommendations on management proposals and resolutions and how the potential agency costs could moderate such voting behaviour. This study is conducted using all corporate capital proposals put to vote by management during the annual general meetings (AGM) of publicly listed firms on the London Stock Exchange over a period of 17 years from 2000 to 2016. Building on agency theory and the concept of the monitoring function of institutional shareholders, this study finds that long-term institutional shareholders do support board recommendations on management proposals, but potential agency concerns linked to excess cash holding can negatively moderate this relationship. Additional analysis reveals that this moderating effect is observed only for management proposals related to cash inflows, specifically after the 2007–2009 financial crisis. This study highlights the importance of long-term institutional shareholders actively monitoring firms’ cash holdings and using voting to address agency concerns while advising corporate managers to optimise cash management and stay attuned to shareholder preferences. For policymakers, the research suggests promoting transparency in corporate governance and strengthening shareholder engagement to reduce agency problems and improve governance. Several robustness tests are conducted, and the results support our predictions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".