We examine whether shareholder votes in environmental and social (ES) proposals are informative about firms’ ES risks. ES proposals are unique in that they nearly always fail. We examine whether mutual funds’ support for these failed proposals contains information about the ES risks that firms face. Higher support in failed ES proposals predicts subsequent ES incidents and the effects of these incidents on shareholder value. Examining the detailed records of fund votes, we find that agency frictions between a group of shareholders contribute to proposal failure.

中文翻译：

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ES 风险和股东的声音

我们检查股东在环境和社会 (ES) 提案中的投票是否提供有关公司 ES 风险的信息。ES 提案的独特之处在于它们几乎总是失败。我们检查共同基金对这些失败提案的支持是否包含有关公司面临的 ES 风险的信息。对失败的 ES 提案的更高支持预示着随后的 ES 事件以及这些事件对股东价值的影响。检查基金投票的详细记录，我们发现一组股东之间的代理摩擦导致提案失败。