Yearly Archives: 2013

Statement Regarding Joint Rule Reproposal Concerning Credit Risk Retention

Posted by Michael S. Piwowar, Commissioner, U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Friday, September 20, 2013
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Michael S. Piwowar is a Commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on Commissioner Piwowar’s statement regarding the SEC’s joint rule reproposal concerning credit risk retention. The views expressed in the post are those of Commissioner Piwowar and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the other Commissioners, or the Staff.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC” or “Commission”) today approved a joint rule reproposal to implement Section 941 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”). [1] I am not able to support the release in the form approved because the reproposal does not contain necessary economic analyses and does not adequately consider alternatives to credit risk retention requirements or the interplay between those requirements and other regulatory reforms.

Before discussing these shortcomings, I want to recognize all the hard work the SEC’s staff in the Division of Corporation Finance and the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (“DERA”) put into developing the joint rule reproposal. I also want to thank them for briefing me on the rulemaking and answering my questions.

While I am not able to vote in favor of the reproposal, I am encouraged that some improvements were made to the original proposal in response to public comments. For example, the reproposal removes the problematic premium capture cash reserve account approach. And, with respect to some classes of asset-backed securities (“ABS”), the reproposal revises various risk retention obligations and allows alternative incentive alignment practices.

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New York Court Upholds Kenneth Cole Going Private Transaction

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, September 19, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Tariq Mundiya, partner in the litigation department of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, and is based on a Willkie client memorandum by Mr. Mundiya and Sameer Advani.

On September 3, 2013, a New York trial court dismissed a stockholder challenge to a going private transaction in which Kenneth Cole, who held approximately 47% of the Company’s outstanding common stock and controlled 90% of the voting power of Kenneth Cole Productions Inc. (“KCP”), purchased the remaining 53% of the common stock of KCP that he did not already own. Willkie Farr & Gallagher represented Mr. Cole in the underlying going private transaction and the class action litigation that ensued.

The Facts

On February 24, 2012, KCP announced that Mr. Cole had proposed a transaction to take KCP private and to pay the public stockholders $15.00 per share, which reflected a 17% premium to KCP’s unaffected share price. KCP’s board created a special committee of four independent directors to negotiate with Mr. Cole, who conditioned his bid on the approval of the special committee and the affirmative vote of a majority of the minority stockholders. Mr. Cole made it publicly clear that he would not entertain any offers to sell his shares in a third party transaction and was only interested in buying shares from the minority stockholders. After several months of negotiations, Mr. Cole agreed to pay $15.25 per share. 99.8% of KCP’s shares unaffiliated with Mr. Cole that voted ultimately voted in favor of the transaction.

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Will Recent Delaware Court Decisions Curb Excessive M&A Litigation?

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Andrew J. Noreuil, partner focusing on mergers and acquisitions and corporate governance practice at Mayer Brown LLP, and is based on a Mayer Brown legal update by Mr. Noreuil. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

The Delaware Chancery Court has issued three decisions in 2013 that demonstrate the court’s willingness to rein in the excessive and often frivolous litigation challenging public M&A transactions.

Recent trends in shareholder litigation illustrate the magnitude of the litigation issues facing corporations in public M&A transactions. Of the public company acquisition transactions with a value over $500 million that were announced in 2007, 53% were challenged in shareholder litigation. By 2012, 96% of such transactions were subject to shareholder suits, with an average of 5.4 suits filed for each deal. In addition, for Delaware target corporations valued at over $100 million, 65% of the M&A deals announced in 2012 were subject to litigation in Delaware and in at least one other jurisdiction (usually the jurisdiction where the corporation’s principal place of business is located). Finally, for shareholder suits in deals over $100 million that were announced in 2012 and ultimately settled, shareholders received only supplemental disclosures in 81% of such settlements (so-called “disclosure-only settlements”), with plaintiffs’ attorneys fees and expenses being the only cash paid out by defendants in such suits.

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Does the Market for CEO Talent Explain Controversial CEO Pay Practices?

Posted by Martijn Cremers, University of Notre Dame, and Yaniv Grinstein, Cornell University, on
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
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Martijn Cremers is a Professor of Finance at the University of Notre Dame. Yaniv Grinstein is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

Considerable debate remains among academics and practitioners regarding the economic forces that drive CEO compensation practices in the United States. Some view the market for CEO talent as the main economic force that drives the level and form of CEO compensation (e.g., Rosen, 1992; Gabaix and Landier, 2008). Others argue that these forces have little effect on CEO compensation because of frictions such as managerial entrenchment, asymmetric information, and transaction costs of replacing managers, believing instead that compensation practices are by and large driven by the bargaining power that the CEO has vis-à-vis the board (e.g., Bebchuk and Fried, 2003).

The debate has intensified in recent years due to several controversial compensation practices, a first example of which is the tendency of firms to benchmark CEO compensation to that of other CEOs. While some find benchmarking consistent with competitive compensation (Holmstrom and Kaplan, 2003; Bizjak et al., 2008), others argue it is a way for CEOs to increase their compensation by benchmarking themselves to highly paid CEOs (e.g., Faulkender and Yang, 2010).

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Don’t Run Away from the Evidence: A Reply to Wachtell Lipton

Posted by Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, Alon Brav, Duke University, and Wei Jiang, Columbia Business School, on
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
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Lucian Bebchuk is Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Alon Brav is Professor of Finance at Duke University. Wei Jiang is Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia Business School. This post responds to two Wachtell Lipton memoranda posted by Martin Lipton, available on the Forum here and here. These memoranda criticize the recently-issued empirical study by Bebchuk, Brav, and Jiang on the long-term effects of hedge fund activism. The study is available here, and its results are summarized in a Forum post and in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article.

In two recent memoranda by the law firm of Wachtell Lipton (Wachtell), The Bebchuk Syllogism (Syllogism memo) and Current Thoughts about Activism (Current Thoughts memo), the firm’s founder Martin Lipton and several other senior Wachtell lawyers strongly criticize our recent study, The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism. Our study empirically disproves the myopic activists claim that interventions by activist hedge funds are in the long term detrimental to the involved companies and their long-term shareholders. This post responds to the main criticisms of our work in Wachtell’s memos. Below we proceed as follows:

  • First, we discuss the background of how our study meets a challenge that Wachtell issued several months ago;
  • Second, we highlight how Wachtell’s critiques of our study fail to raise any questions concerning the validity of our findings concerning long-term returns, which by themselves are sufficient to undermine the myopic activists claim that Wachtell has long been putting forward;
  • Third, we explain that the methodological criticisms Wachtell directs at our findings concerning long-term operating performance are unwarranted;
  • Fourth, we show that Wachtell’s causality claim cannot provide it with a substitute basis for its opposition to hedge fund activism;
  • Finally, we explain why Wachtell’s expressed preference for favoring anecdotal evidence and reports of experience over empirical evidence should be rejected.

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Accuracy in Proxy Monitoring

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, September 16, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Heidi Welsh, Executive Director at the Sustainable Investments Institute (Si2), and is based on a Si2 report. This post relates to reports by Proxy Monitor, the most recent of which was discussed on the Forum here.

Shareholder activists are meeting now to consider what proposals they will file for the 2014 proxy season and the results are largely in from the 2013 proxy season, with analysis coming from all the different proponent groups, the proxy advisory firms and others interested in what happened this year. Si2’s own report in August showed that the upward climb of investor support for social and environmental policy proposals continued this year, with average support hitting a record level of 21.3 percent and requests for more board and workplace diversity, sustainability reporting and corporate political activity disclosure got the highest levels of support. (More information on these overall findings and overall trends, illustrated with charts, appears here.)

One group that reports on proxy season findings is Proxy Monitor, a project of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Studies. It focuses on resolutions that go to votes at the 250 largest U.S. firms, reporting on the vote results and presenting analysis of the trends on its website. The group’s analyses of proxy season results trends have some significant blind spots that are not always apparent to the novice proxy analyst, but its reports nonetheless are widely quoted in the press. As such, they deserve some scrutiny, which this post offers. Si2 took a look at all the shareholder resolutions filed since 2010 and compared the results to the Proxy Monitor database to see precisely how PM reaches its conclusions.

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Executive Pay Disparity and the Cost of Equity Capital

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Sunday, September 15, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Zhihong Chen of the Department of Accountancy at City University of Hong Kong, Yuan Huang of the School of Accounting and Finance at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and K.C. John Wei, Professor of Finance at Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST).

In our paper, Executive Pay Disparity and the Cost of Equity Capital, forthcoming in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, we investigate the association between executive pay disparity and the cost of equity capital. Understanding the association is important because the cost of capital is one of the key considerations for managers in their capital budgeting and corporate financing decisions. In fact, the cost of capital is a more direct yardstick of corporate investment and financing decisions than firm valuation. A higher cost of capital means fewer positive net present value (NPV) projects, leading to fewer growth opportunities. In addition, the cost of capital summarizes an investor’s risk-return tradeoff in his resource allocation decision (Pástor, Sinha, and Swaminathan (2008)).

In general, there are two perspectives on executive pay disparity. The tournament perspective views the large pay gap between the CEO and other executives as the prize for a tournament in which players compete for the CEO position (Lazear and Rosen (1981); Kale, Reis, and Venkateswaran (2009)). A large pay disparity motivates non-CEO senior executives to work hard and to invest in firm-specific human capital. This, in turn, helps build a large pool of skilled internal candidates for the CEO position. The availability of skilled internal candidates not only reduces the entrenchment of the incumbent CEO by increasing the bargaining power of the board, but also reduces CEO succession risk. Therefore, this perspective predicts a negative association between executive pay disparity and the cost of capital.

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Agencies Propose Revised Risk Retention Rule

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Saturday, September 14, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Susan M. Curtis, partner and co-head of the Structured Finance Group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, and is based on a Skadden memorandum.

On August 28, 2013, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (collectively, Agencies) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (Proposed Rule) in connection with the risk retention requirement mandated by Section 941 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act). The Proposed Rule can be found here.

Background

The risk retention requirements of Section 941 of the Dodd-Frank Act are intended to align the interests of securitizers with those of other securitization transaction participants by requiring securitizers to retain some of the credit risk in the assets they securitize, or to have “skin in the game.” Section 941 added Section 15G to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which requires the Agencies to prescribe risk retention rules. Section 15G also generally requires a securitizer to retain no less than 5 percent of the credit risk in assets it sells into a securitization and prohibits a securitizer from directly or indirectly hedging or otherwise transferring the credit risk that the securitizer is required to retain, subject to limited exemptions. The Proposed Rule follows the initial rule proposal and request for comment by the Agencies released in April 2011 (the Original Proposal). As described below, the Proposed Rule reflects comments received on the Original Proposal and re-proposes the risk retention rules with a number of modifications.

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Disclosure Lessons from the 2013 Proxy Season

Posted by Matteo Tonello, The Conference Board, on
Friday, September 13, 2013
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Matteo Tonello is managing director of corporate leadership at The Conference Board. This post relates to an issue of The Conference Board’s Director Notes series authored by James D. C. Barrall, David T. Della Rocca, Carol B. Samaan, Julie D. Crisp, and Michelle M. Khoury.

In light of increased transparency and governance expectations imposed by shareholder advisory groups and increasingly aggressive attempts by plaintiffs’ firms to enjoin shareholder votes on key compensation issues, U.S. public companies face a substantial burden to provide adequate disclosure in their annual proxy statements. This Director Notes examines the key disclosure issues and challenges facing companies during the 2013 proxy season and provides examples of company responses to these issues taken from proxy statements filed during the first half of 2013.

U.S. public companies face a substantial burden to provide adequate disclosure in their annual proxy statements. In addition to complying with a growing number of increasingly burdensome disclosure rules from Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), companies must take into account corporate governance guidelines from institutional shareholder advisory groups such as Institutional Shareholder Services (“ISS”) and Glass Lewis & Co. Moreover, a recent wave of proxy injunction lawsuits has added to this burden and created additional issues and challenges for companies. The plaintiffs’ bar has also been actively pursuing damage claims against public companies based on disclosure and corporate governance issues, including issues relating to Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the “Code”). All of these developments present many traps for the unwary. As a result, companies should review their executive compensation disclosure and their say-on-pay and equity plan proposals to determine whether additional disclosures, beyond those required by statutes and rules, are appropriate to attempt to reduce the risk of a potential lawsuit or investigation by a plaintiff’s law firm.

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Corporate Innovations and Mergers and Acquisitions

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, September 12, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Jan Bena and Kai Li, both of the Finance Division at the University of British Columbia.

It has long been argued that synergies are key drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), and that many M&As occur due to technology reasons. However, there is little direct evidence of whether and how synergies in the technology space drive individual firms’ decisions to participate in M&As, and of how they affect merger outcomes. In our paper, Corporate Innovations and Mergers and Acquisitions, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, we first examine the relation between characteristics of corporate innovation activities and whether a firm becomes an acquirer or a target firm. We then study whether technological overlap between firm pairs affects transaction incidence. Finally, using a sample of bids withdrawn due to reasons exogenous to innovation as a control sample, we estimate the effect of a merger on future innovation output when there is pre-merger technological overlap between merging firms. Our large and unique patent-merger data set over the period 1984 to 2006 allows us to construct targeted measures of innovation output and technological overlap, extending the analysis of Hoberg and Phillips (2010) in product markets.

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