By exploiting the local randomness in close-call votes on governance-related shareholder proposals, this paper finds a negative effect of passing a governance proposal on firms’ ex-ante tail risk measured by the cost of option protection against downside tail risks, which suggests that corporate governance is priced in the option market. In a local regression discontinuity (RD) analysis, firms that narrowly pass the majority threshold show a lower ex-ante tail risk measured by implied volatility smirk and model-free implied skewness than those that narrowly fail.