We examine the determinants of the length of shareholder meetings and its impact on firm performance. We gather the information of annual meetings of public firms in Taiwan over the period 2010–2014, and provide evidence that the duration of shareholder meetings is longer for firms that have greater information asymmetry, undertake more non-operating investments, report more financial restatements, and whose directors pledge larger amount of shares. Moreover, firms with lengthy shareholder meetings underperform their counterpart firms in terms of profitability and stock return over the subsequent year. We also find that the negative relation between shareholder meeting length and subsequent performance is stronger for firms with greater information opacity and agency conflict. Our results are robust to a battery of checks involving estimating the regressions using additional control variables, a matched sample, and simulation. Taken together, these findings constitute new evidence on the information content of the length of shareholder meetings.
