We find that a firm’s stock price drops when its compensation peer firm announces a severe say-on-pay voting failure. This price drop causes a reduction in the focal firm CEO’s pay in the following period. The effect on CEO pay is stronger when the board of directors is more powerful, when the proxy advisor holds a negative view of the CEO’s pay, and when the hired compensation consultant is less reputable. Directors who cut their CEO’s pay following the price drop receive more voting support from investors than other directors. Our findings show that the peer firm’s voting failure induces a market-feedback effect for focal firm directors.

The Transition Report 2024-25 focuses on industrial policies in the EBRD regions and beyond. Such policies have seen a resurgence, seeking to address market failures such as environmental degradation. However, their track record is mixed. Their growing popularity is shaped primarily by domestic political economy considerations and rising geopolitical tensions. While industrial policies are typically employed by higher-income economies, they are also now used more frequently in economies with less administrative and fiscal capacity to implement them.

Different types of bankruptcy restructuring procedures are used in most legal systems to decide the fate of businesses facing financial hardship. We study how bargaining failures in an under-researched type of restructuring procedure, a formal out-of-the court procedure impacts the economic performance of participating firms. Croatia introduced a “pre-bankruptcy settlement” (PBS) process in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. A novel dataset provides us with annual financial statements for both sides of more than 180,000 debtor–creditor pairs, enabling us to address selection into failed negotiations by matching a rich set of creditor and debtor characteristics. Failures to settle at the PBS stage due to idiosyncratic bargaining problems, which effectively delay entry into the standard bankruptcy procedure, lead to a lower rate of survival among debtors as well as reduced employment, revenue, and profits. We are the first study to track how bargaining failures diffuse through the network of creditors, finding a significant negative effect on small creditors, but not others. Our results highlight the impact of delay and the importance of structuring bankruptcy procedures, to rapidly resolve uncertainty about firms’ future prospects.

Bankruptcy restructuring procedures are used in most legal systems to decide the fate of businesses facing financial hardship. We study how bargaining failures in such procedures impact the economic performance of participating firms in the context of Croatia, which introduced a „pre-bankruptcy settlement“ (PBS) process in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007 - 2009. Local institutions left over from the communist era provide annual financial statements for both sides of more than 180,000 debtor-creditor pairs, enabling us to address selection into failed negotiations by matching a rich set of creditor and debtor characteristics. Failures to settle at the PBS stage due to idiosyncratic bargaining problems, which effectively delays entry into the standard bankruptcy procedure, leads to a lower rate of survival among debtors as well as reduced employment, revenue, and profits. We also track how bargaining failures diffuse through the network of creditors, finding a significant negative effect on small creditors, but not others. Our results highlight the impact of delay and the importance of structuring bankruptcy procedures to rapidly resolve uncertainty about firms‘ future prospects.