Governance, Liquidity, and Employee Retention in an Era of Capital Abundance was the full title of last Thursday’s morning event sponsored by the Silicon Valley Directors Exchange and Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. As billed, we were to hear a panel of experts discuss the role of the board of directors in addressing challenges of […]
Public Companies Endangered Species: CII Panel Are public companies an endangered species? If so, why? How can we solve that problem? At last week’s Council of Institutional Investors (CII) Fall Conference there as an informative panel discussion entitled Public Companies: An Endangered Species? Panelists were David Brown, Michael Mauboussin, and Robert McCooey moderated by the always erudite and entertaining Frank Partnoy, one of the […]
Below are some relatively quick notes I took at the Corporate Directors Forum 2013, held on the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego, January 27-29, 2013. See materials, Corporate Directors Forum 2013: Bonus Session, and Corporate Directors Forum 2013 – Day 1, Part 1. The program was subject to the Chatham House Rule, so there will be little in […]
With the passage of the Dodd-Frank and the Sarbanes Oxley Acts, clawback policies have become increasingly prevalent among public companies. However, it is rare to find a company actually put a clawback policy into effect. Citing Equilar’s findings from the 2012 Clawback Policies Report, we review what a clawback policy is and we examine what […]
When I reviewed the first edition of The Role of Independent Directors after Sarbanes-Oxley by Bruce F. Dravis I called it an entire reference library in a thin volume. For the second edition, entitled The Role of Independent Directors in Corporate Governance, the number of pages has gone up from about 170 to 250 and […]
New research from Cesare Fracassi of the Department of Finance at the University of Texas at Austin and Geoffrey Tate of the Department of Finance at the University of California, Los Angeles finds that board composition should be a continuing target of regulatory reforms. Our results suggest that having directors with external network ties to the CEO may undermine […]
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP produced a good legal primer, Corporate Governance: An Overview of Public Company Requirements, last month. Read it now before it is out of date. Covers Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and listing requirements in eleven sections: Director Independence Audit Committees Compensation Committees Nominating Committees Compensation Codes of Conduct Certifications Directors/Officers Disclosure Foreign Issuers […]
Webster Named The US Securities and Exchange Commission voted to approve five members of a new national accounting oversight board to be headed by ex-FBI-CIA chief William Webster whose only experience in accounting, as far as we know, was heading the auditing committee of U.S. Technologies, now bankrupt and facing fraud accusations. Shortly before Webster […]