Yearly Archives: 2014

Relative Total Shareholder Return Performance Awards

Posted by Yaron Nili, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, November 14, 2014
, , , ,
More from: , ,

The following post comes to us from Frederic W. Cook & Co., Inc., and is based on the Executive Summary of a FW Cook publication by David Cole and Jin Fu. The complete publication is available here.

Since 2010, performance-contingent awards have been the most widely used long-term incentive (LTI) grant type among the Top 250 companies [1] and are now in use by 89% of the sample. The prevalence of performance awards and investor preferences have spurred considerable interest in relative total shareholder return (TSR) as a performance metric. Relative TSR measures a company’s shareholder returns [2] against an external comparator group and eliminates the need to set multi-year goals. Use of relative TSR performance awards among the Top 250 companies has increased from 29% in 2010 to 49% in 2014, and relative TSR is now the most prevalent measure used to evaluate company performance for performance awards.

READ MORE »

Executive Compensation in Controlled Companies

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, November 13, 2014
, , , , , ,
More from:

Kobi Kastiel is a fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. His article, Executive Compensation in Controlled Companies, is forthcoming in the January 2015 issue of Indiana Law Journal and available here. Additional work from the Program on Corporate Governance on executive compensation includes Paying for Long-Term Performance by Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried, discussed on the Forum here.

More than a decade ago, Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried published the seminal work on the role and significance of managerial power theory in executive compensation. Their work cultivated a vivid debate on executive compensation in companies with dispersed ownership. The discourse on the optimality of executive pay in controlled companies, however, has been more monolithic. Conventional wisdom among corporate law theorists has long suggested that the presence of a controlling shareholder should alleviate the problem of managerial opportunism because such a controller has both the power and incentives to curb excessive executive pay.

My Article, Executive Compensation in Controlled Companies, forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal, challenges that common understanding by proposing a different view that is based on an agency problem paradigm, and by presenting a comprehensive framework for understanding the relationship between concentrated ownership and executive pay. On the theoretical level, the Article shows that controlling shareholders often have incentives to overpay professional managers instead of having an arm’s-length contract with them, and therefore it suggests that compensation practices in a large number of controlled companies may have their own pathologies.

READ MORE »

Cyber Security, Cyber Governance, and Cyber Insurance

Posted by Paul Ferrillo, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, on
Thursday, November 13, 2014
, , , , , ,
More from: , ,

Paul A. Ferrillo is counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP specializing in complex securities and business litigation. This post is based on an article authored by Mr. Ferrillo and Christine Marciano, President of Cyber Data Risk Managers.

JP Morgan Chase. Community Health Systems. The Home Depot. Kmart. There has been no shortage of data breaches in recent weeks—with new developments on an almost daily basis. The age of cyber hactivisim, cyber extortion, and cyber terrorism is here, and it is not going away any time soon.

Data security issues are no longer just an IT Department concern. Indeed, they have become a matter of corporate survival, and therefore companies should incorporate them into enterprise risk management and insurance risk transfer mechanisms, just as they regularly insure other hazards of doing business. As the number of data breaches has increased, the demand for cyber insurance has likewise dramatically increased more than that for any other insurance product in recent years. Every board of directors should be questioning its officers and management as to “whether or not its company should be purchasing cyber insurance to mitigate its cyber risk.” If management answers, “Oh, it costs too much,” or “Oh, it will never pay off,” second opinions should be obtained. Rapidly. Because neither answer is correct.

READ MORE »

Controlling Stockholders in Delaware—More Than a Number

Posted by Daniel E. Wolf, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, on
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
, , , , , , ,
More from: , ,

Daniel Wolf is a partner at Kirkland & Ellis focusing on mergers and acquisitions. The following post is based on a Kirkland memorandum by Mr. Wolf and David B. Feirstein. 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.

Two recent Chancery Court decisions, Crimson Exploration and KKR Financial, confirm that Delaware takes a flexible and fact-specific approach to determining whether a stockholder is deemed to be “controlling” for purposes of judicial review of a transaction. It is important for dealmakers to understand when the courts may make a determination of control, both to properly craft a defensible process and to understand the prospects for resulting deal litigation.

READ MORE »

Governance and Comovement Under Common Ownership

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
, , , ,
More from: , ,

The following post comes to us from Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School; Doron Levit of the Finance Department at the University of Pennsylvania; and Devin Reilly of the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most existing theories of blockholder governance consider a single firm. However, in reality, many institutional investors hold blocks in multiple firms. In our paper, Governance and Comovement Under Common Ownership, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we study the implications of common ownership for corporate governance and asset pricing. In particular, we address two broad questions. First, does holding multiple blocks weaken governance by spreading a blockholder too thinly, as commonly believed? If not, under what conditions can multi-firm ownership improve governance? Second, can common ownership lead to correlation between stocks with independent fundamentals, and if so, in which direction?

READ MORE »

Harvard Convenes the Executive Compensation Roundtable

Posted by Scott Hirst, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
, ,
More from:

The Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and the Harvard Law School Program on Institutional Investors convened the Harvard Roundtable on Executive Compensation last Thursday, November 6. The event brought together for a roundtable discussion prominent representatives of the investor, issuer, advisor, and academic communities. Participants in the event, and the topics of discussion, are set out below.

The Roundtable, which was co-organized by Lucian Bebchuk, Stephen Davis, and Scott Hirst, was sponsored by Pearl Meyer & Partners. In addition to Pearl Meyer & Partners, the Roundtable was supported by a number of co-sponsors (listed here), the supporting organizations of the Program on Corporate Governance (listed on the program site here), and the institutional members of the Harvard Institutional Investor Forum (listed here).

The Roundtable sessions focused on both the process for determining executive compensation, and on substantive pay arrangements. The Roundtable discussion on issues relating to the process of determining executive compensation included discussion of the work of proxy advisors and their interaction with investors and issuers, engagement between issuers and investors themselves and compensation disclosure issues. The Roundtable then moved to a discussion of the substantive terms of compensation arrangements, including compensation levels, composition, and structures. Issues that were considered included the choice of peer groups, the composition of long-term and short-term incentive pay and contractual provisions such as claw-backs and golden parachutes.

The participants in the Harvard Roundtable on Executive Compensation included:

READ MORE »

Strategic News Releases in Equity Vesting Months

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
, , ,
More from: , , ,

The following post comes to us from Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School; Luis Goncalves-Pinto of the Department of Finance at the National University of Singapore; Yanbo Wang of the Finance Area at INSEAD; and Moqi Xu of the Department of Finance at the London School of Economics.

In our paper, Strategic News Releases in Equity Vesting Months, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we study the link between the equity vesting schedules of CEOs and the timing of corporate news releases. We show that, in months in which the CEO has equity vesting, the firm releases more news. This is an easy way to pump up the short-term stock price, as news attracts attention to the stock. This attention also increases trading volume, which allows the CEO to cash out his equity in a more liquid market. Indeed, we find that these news releases lead to significant increases in the stock price and trading volume in a 16-day window, but the effect dies down over 31 days, consistent with a temporary attention boost. The median CEO cashes out all of his vesting equity within seven days—within the window of price and volume inflation.

READ MORE »

Why Commissioner Gallagher is Mistaken about Disclosure of Political Spending

Posted by Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Columbia Law School, on
Monday, November 10, 2014
, , , , , , ,
More from: ,

Lucian Bebchuk is Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Robert J. Jackson, Jr. is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Bebchuk and Jackson served as co-chairs of the Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending, which filed a rulemaking petition requesting that the SEC require all public companies to disclose their political spending, discussed on the Forum here. Bebchuk and Jackson are also co-authors of Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, published last year in the Georgetown Law Journal. A series of posts in which Bebchuk and Jackson respond to objections to an SEC rule requiring disclosure of corporate political spending is available here.

Last week, Securities and Exchange Commissioner Daniel Gallagher took the unusual step of publishing a letter to the editor of the New York Times expressing his opposition to the SEC even considering companies’ disclosure of political spending. In his letter, the Commissioner vows “to fight to keep” the subject off the SEC’s agenda. As explained below, however, his letter fails to provide a substantive basis for his vehement opposition to transparency in corporate spending on politics.

READ MORE »

Making It Easier for Directors To “Do The Right Thing”

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, November 10, 2014
, , , , , , , ,
More from:

The following post is based on a recent Harvard Business Law Review article by Leo Strine, Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court and a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance. The article, Making It Easier For Directors To “Do The Right Thing”, is available here. 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.

Leo Strine, Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, and the Austin Wakeman Scott Lecturer on Law and a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, has recently published an article in the Harvard Business Law Review. The essay, titled Making It Easier For Directors To “Do The Right Thing”, is available here. The essay posits that benefit corporation statutes have the potential to change the accountability structure within which managers operate and thus create incremental reform that puts actual power behind the idea that corporations should “do the right thing.”

The abstract of Chief Justice Strine’s essay summarizes it briefly as follows:

READ MORE »

ISS, Share Authorizations, and New Data Verification Process

Posted by Yaron Nili, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Sunday, November 9, 2014
, , , , , ,
More from: ,

The following post comes to us from John R. Ellerman, founding partner of Pay Governance, and is based on a Pay Governance memorandum by Mr. Ellerman.

Publicly traded companies are required by the SEC and the stock exchanges to obtain shareholder approval when such companies seek to implement a new long‐term equity plan or increase the share reserve pursuant to such plans.

Companies comply with this requirement by seeking shareholder approval through the annual proxy process. Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), the large proxy advisory firm retained by many institutional investors for proxy voting advice, offers its services to institutional clients by evaluating such proposals. One of the tools used by ISS in developing its voting advice is a financial model referred to as the Shareholder Value Transfer (SVT) Model that attempts to assign a cost to each company’s equity plan. ISS’ proprietary SVT model contains numerous hidden values and algorithms a company cannot readily replicate. If the SVT Model results in an assigned cost that falls outside the boundaries of what is acceptable to ISS, ISS will submit a negative vote recommendation.

READ MORE »

Page 8 of 61
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 … 61