There’s a novel thought: enforcing laws on white collar crime.Take the extensive money laundering Mr. Manafort is accused of undertaking with shell companies that hide ownership. How could he have expected to get away with it? Perhaps he saw what happened when one of the world’s largest banks, HSBC, helped launder billions of dollars in…
Investors’ Attention to Corporate Governance by Peter Iliev, Jonathan Kalodimos, Michelle Lowry
Seems like a pretty nuanced cost-benefit analysis to us. We develop a direct measure of investor scrutiny to assess the extent of governance-related research conducted by 97 mutual fund families in 3,706 companies, over a seven-year period. Our governance measure is based on the number of times each investor accesses each firm’s proxy and proxy-related…
Corporate Boards Are Looking for CEOs Who Aren’t Old White Men – Bloomberg
A growing number of companies, including Tyson, Republic Services, Foot Locker, and Best Buy, are eschewing traditional board candidates—retired chief executive officers, who are overwhelmingly older white men—and opting for diverse members, many of them first-timers with no experience.In 2017, 45 percent of appointees to the boards of S&P 500 companies were novice directors, the…
Nell Minow: How Only Corporate Governance Can Save the World
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow spoke to students at Sarah Lawrence College about the challenges and opportunities of corporate governance.
No Gender Gap in CEO Compensation
So, female CEOs are just as overpaid as male CEOs — not surprising, going back to one of the most overpaid CEOs in history, Linda Wachner at Warnaco. The bigger problem is that there is no evidence that female CEOs are better at company-wide pay equity than the men. Our results reveal that there is…
Avenue Capital to launch ‘impact’ investment fund, source says
Avenue Capital Group LLC, a New York-based investment firm with $9.4 billion in assets under management, plans to launch a fund this year that will focus on so-called impact credit investments, according to a person familiar with the matter.The Avenue fund will primarily make debt investments, along with some equity, in North American companies, the…
As Zuckerberg heads to Capitol Hill, a call to replace him as Facebook’s chairman – The Washington Post
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow was quoted in a Washington Post story about the likelihood of splitting the Chairman and CEO positions at Facebook: Minow predicted it was much more likely Facebook’s board would answer the call for more independent directors than it would be to demote Zuckerberg. The company has a lead independent director — Gates Foundation CEO…
Disclosure Is About Risks And Opportunities, Not Politics
Felicia Jackson writes in Forbes: Climate and environmental information reporting is becoming mainstream. The focus on risk disclosure means it doesn’t matter whether you believe in climate change or not – what matters is transparency about corporate risk.As Richard Samans, Chairman, CDSB and Managing Director, Head of Policy and Institutional Impact at the World Economic…
Surprise! Comp Consultants Think CEO Pay is Just Fine
CEO compensation consultants Ira Kay, John Ellerman, and Sarah Blivens make the best arguments they can to support the current system of CEO pay in their firm’s newsletter. We believe that CEO compensation is a major competitive advantage for U.S. companies due to our own and extensive academic research, our decades of consulting with thousands…
The Libertarian Who Accidentally Helped Make the Case for Regulation
When [Alex] Tabarrok and his former grad student Nathan Goldschlag set out to measure how federal regulations impact business growth, they were sure they’d find proof that regulations were dragging down the economy. But they didn’t. No matter how they sliced the data, they could find no evidence that federal regulation was bad for business….
Pension Fund Charges Netflix With Rigging Executive Bonuses
A federal lawsuit filed in the US District Court in San Francisco accuses Netflix of giving undeserved “sham” bonuses to top executives so that the company could take advantage of a prior tax loophole. The pension fund lawsuit was filed by the City of Birmingham Relief and Retirement System, one of the company’s shareholders. The…
The SEC is blunting investor activism over climate, K-Cups and gay rights – The Washington Post
Shareholders battling corporate management over everything from greenhouse gas emissions to discrimination to wasteful K-Cups are finding it more difficult to put their proposed proxy resolutions to votes as a result of new guidance issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission.The SEC has widened the definition of “micromanaging” and business relevance, and on five occasions…
