We said as soon as they accounted it that we did not believe the Business Roundtable’s new claims of commitment to stakeholders. Now Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita confirm that we were right to be skeptical.

By putting American workers through months of turmoil, the Covid-19 crisis has heightened expectations that large companies will serve the interests of all “stakeholders,” not only shareholders. The Business Roundtable raised such expectations last summer by issuing a statement on corporate purpose, in which the CEOs of more than 180 major companies committed to “deliver value to all stakeholders.” Although the Roundtable described the statement as a radical departure from shareholder primacy, observers have been debating whether it signaled a significant shift in how business operates or was a mere public-relations move. We have set out to obtain evidence to resolve this question.

To probe what corporate leaders have in mind, we sought to examine whether they treated joining the Business Roundtable statement as an important corporate decision. Major decisions are typically made by boards of directors. If the commitment expressed in the statement was supposed to produce major changes in how companies treat stakeholders, the boards of the companies should have been expected to approve or at least ratify it.

We contacted the companies whose CEOs signed the Business Roundtable statement and asked who was the highest-level decision maker to approve the decision. Of the 48 companies that responded, only one said the decision was approved by the board of directors. The other 47 indicated that the decision to sign the statement, supposedly adopting a major change in corporate purpose, was not approved by the board of directors.

We received responses from only about three-tenths of the signatories. Yet there is no reason to expect that these companies are less likely than companies electing not to respond to have obtained board approval for joining the statement.

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We supplemented the evidence above with a review of the board-approved corporate governance guidelines of the companies whose CEOs joined the statement. We found that these guidelines, including the many that have been updated since the issuance of the Business Roundtable statement, mostly reflect a clear “shareholder primacy” approach.

via ‘Stakeholder’ Capitalism Seems Mostly for Show – WSJ