Socially Responsible Shareholder Engagement

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - General grade: 8.5 Maastricht University language: English abstract: There is a growing attention for the corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investing (SRI) of organisations and shareholders are increasingly voicing their concerns. This research examined whether the different characteristics of these shareholders have an impact on the support for shareholder proposals that are related to SRI. The effects of European ownership and political views on SRI proposal success of US firms were researched. It was hypothesised that Europeans have a positive effect on proposal success since there is more progression with respect to CSR in Europe compared to the US. No evidence could be found in support of this hypothesis; the results show that European ownership has no significant effect on proposal success. It was also hypothesised that Democratic shareholders increase the chances of proposal success when compared to Republicans. The results show that a 1% increase in the share of Democratic shareholders increases the amount of positive votes on SRI proposals with 0.25%. The same increase in the share of Republican shareholders increases these positive votes by 0.23%. The hypothesis can thus be accepted although the impact is very small. Several limitations were discussed which could be addressed in future research; with an improved regression model the research question could be researched in a more secure manner.