SRI engagement and monitoring was a major theme during my first day at the 28th Annual SRI Conference this year (#AllinForImpact), although my 1st impressions were interrupted by the issuance of SEC SLB 14I, as previously noted. SRI has grown more than 13% a year since 1995 (when I started this blog) and now total over $8.7 trillion in […]
The Deal Professor, Steven Davidoff Solomon, recently discussed voting rules aimed at fostering “long-termism” in his post, France Answers Hostile Bids With the Two-Vote Share. While less damaging than dual-class shares issued at the IPO stage that continue ad infinitum, importing such a scheme to the United States would reinforce the behavior of idiots. (more…)
Buying and holding stocks and bonds for the long term and maintaining a diversified portfolio are still the smartest strategies for the average investor, says Vanguard founder Jack Bogle in answer to Mark Cuban and other critics of these traditional approaches. In the Big Interview with Journal columnist Jason Zweig, Bogle takes aim at the […]
The July 2014 edition of Corporate Governance: An International Review contains four research papers, all dealing with firms outside the US and UK, which usually get most of the attention. Still, insights from these studies could help efforts around the globe, including the US and UK. Monitoring in Japan (more…)
Feng Li and Suraj Srinivasan examine CEO compensation, CEO retention policies, and M&A decisions in firms where founders serve as a director with a non-founder CEO (founder-director firms). They find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to their CEOs than other firms. Pay for performance sensitivity for non-founder CEOs in founder-director firms […]
Cristina Cella investigates whether institutional investors influence firms’ investment policies. By virtue of their significant ownership stakes and investment horizons, long-term institutional investors should closely monitor management and thus reduce agency costs. Using a panel dataset of 2,511 U.S. manufacturing firms that went public in 1980-2003 and using several econometric specifications, she find that firms with […]