Ricerc@Sapienza

Purpose of the paper: Recent research identifies a troubling number of institutional investors that automatically follow the advice of their proxy advisors so that they can prove to have complied with their fiduciary duties in a practice known as robo-voting. Therefore, our central research questions are: How could the characteristics of institutional investors affect robo-voting phenomenon? How could robo-voting phenomenon favour the creation of new opportunistic behaviour, changing the scope of shareholder engagement?

This study is the first to employ a relatively new analytical method to investigate combinations of board structure and other corporate characteristics that lead firms to achieve high levels of say on pay voting, based on configurational analysis.