Analysing voting behaviour in the United States banking sector through eigenvalue decomposition

ABSTRACT

Using data about votes emitted by funds in corporate meetings held by US banks from 2003 to 2013, we propose a novel approach based on eigenvalue decomposition to address the issue of communality in voting decisions. Our results indicate that there is a main underlying feature that contributes to explain this voting behaviour. Also, a dimensionality reduction could be accomplished so that a subset of the original data can replicate the sample. These findings confirm that there may be a sort of homogeneous or systematic component when it comes to explain the voting pattern into the banking industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Voting behaviour
• eigenvalue decomposition
• singular value decomposition
• spectral decomposition

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G21
• G32
• G34

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.