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. Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:42:00 +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 SEC’s Non-Decision Decision on Corporate Political Activity a Policy and Political Mistake – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 SEC’s Non-Decision Decision on Corporate Political Activity a Policy and Political Mistake https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/12/13/secs-non-decision-decision-on-corporate-political-activity-a-policy-and-political-mistake/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=secs-non-decision-decision-on-corporate-political-activity-a-policy-and-political-mistake https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/12/13/secs-non-decision-decision-on-corporate-political-activity-a-policy-and-political-mistake/#comments Fri, 13 Dec 2013 13:51:49 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=56636?d=20230314134342EDT Posted by John Coates, Harvard Law School, on Friday, December 13, 2013
Editor's Note:

John Coates is the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School. His empirical work on corporate political spending includes Corporate Governance and Corporate Political Activity: What Effect Will Citizens United Have on Shareholder Wealth?, Fulfilling Kennedy’s Promise: Why the SEC Should Mandate Disclosure of Corporate Political Activity (with Taylor Lincoln), and Corporate Politics, Governance, and Value Before and after Citizens United.

The SEC’s recent decision to take disclosure of political activities off the SEC’s agenda is a policy mistake, as it ignores the best research on the point, described below, and perpetuates a key loophole in the investor-relevant disclosure rules, allowing large companies to omit material information about the politically inflected risks they run with other people’s money. It is also a political mistake, as it repudiates the 600,000+ investors who have written to the SEC personally to ask it to adopt a rule requiring such disclosure, and will let entrenched business interests focus their lobbying solely on watering down regulation mandated under the Dodd-Frank Act and the 2012 securities law statute, rather than having also to work to influence a disclosure regime.

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