ABSTRACT
Objective:
This paper verified the relationship between shareholder activism and the elements of corporate governance and financial performance of selected Brazilian companies, articulating the agency theory and the voice concept from the exit, voice and loyalty theory.
Methods:
Activism was determined by a score constituted by the sum of its occurrences, observed in the minutes of the 2016 and 2017 general meetings of the 100 public companies in the sample. Governance and performance factors corresponded to 2015 and 2016, collected from Economática®. Quantile regressions (QR) were applied and the results were compared with ordinary least squares regressions (OLS).
Results:
there was a better adjustment of QR compared to the OLS method, suggesting that governance negatively affects activism and that its effects are heterogeneous in different parts of its distribution. Inconclusive results were obtained for performance variables. Robustness tests indicated better explanatory ability for activism observations in companies positioned in the last 20% of the activism indicator’s distribution.
Conclusion:
significant evidence of a relationship between activism and governance was found, which does not occur conclusively in relation to performance, revealing the predominance of the first variable.
Keywords:
shareholder activism; corporate governance; quantile regression; agency theory
