The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sat, 25 Apr 2026 11:30:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Corporate Governance Practices of U.S. Initial Public Offerings – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Corporate Governance Practices of U.S. Initial Public Offerings https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2011/12/07/corporate-governance-practices-of-u-s-initial-public-offerings/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=corporate-governance-practices-of-u-s-initial-public-offerings https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2011/12/07/corporate-governance-practices-of-u-s-initial-public-offerings/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:50:08 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=23463?d=20150113153347EST Posted by Richard J. Sandler, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, on Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Editor's Note:

Richard J. Sandler is a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and co-head of the firm’s global corporate governance group. This post is based on portions of a Davis Polk publication titled Governance Practices for IPO Companies: A Davis Polk Survey; the complete survey, including a discussion of controlled companies which is omitted below, is available here.

As an advisor to underwriters and issuers in initial public offerings, we surveyed the corporate governance practices of recent U.S. IPOs to identify current market trends. We focused on the top 50 IPOs of U.S. companies from January 1, 2009 through August 31, 2011 in terms of deal size of the IPO. [*] The deal size of the examined IPOs ranged from $132.0 million to $18.14 billion.

Significant Findings

In doing our research, we compared our findings in this survey to those in our 2009 survey. We found that generally, despite the growing pressure for certain corporate governance provisions in seasoned issuers, the corporate governance practices at the IPO companies that we surveyed in 2011 remained in many ways unchanged from those in our 2009 survey. In both surveys, there were approximately similar results for the existence of classified boards, voting standards in uncontested board elections and the percentage of audit committee independence at the time of the IPO. Indeed, we found many fewer companies separating the role of CEO and Chairman of the board in our 2011 survey—34% as compared with 52% in the 2009 survey.

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