Monthly Archives: January 2014

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Financial Regulation: Case Studies and Implications

Posted by John Coates, Harvard Law School, on
Friday, January 31, 2014
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John Coates is the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act mandated over 200 new rules, bringing renewed attention to the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in financial regulation. CBA proponents and industry advocates have criticized the independent financial regulatory agencies for failing to base the new rules on CBA, and many have sought to mandate judicial review of quantified CBA (examples of “white papers” advocating CBA of financial regulation can be found here and here). An increasing number of judicial challenges to financial regulations have been brought in the D.C. Circuit under existing law, many successful, and bills have been introduced in Congress to mandate CBA of financial regulation.

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Ten Changes to Expect from the SEC’s New Enforcement Program

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, January 31, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Jon N. Eisenberg, partner in the Government Enforcement practice at K&L Gates LLP, and is based on a K&L Gates publication by Mr. Eisenberg.

Investors, borrowers, financial institutions, and the economy were not the only casualties of the financial crisis. Regulators were casualties too, and the SEC was one of the hardest hit. Two Harris Polls—one conducted in 2007 before the financial crisis and the other in 2009 after much of the damage had been done—tell the story. Between 2007 and 2009, favorable ratings of the SEC dropped from 71% to 29%, while the percentage of the public rating it fair or poor rose from 25% to 72%. “By a wide margin,” the Harris organization stated, “[this was] the biggest change in an agency’s ratings since these questions were first asked in 2000.” Indeed, the SEC’s 29% positive rating was a full 15 points worse than even the second-lowest rated agency in the survey. Congress attacked the Commission as well, as when Long Island Representative Gary Ackerman burst out in a hearing, “Whose job is it to protect the investors? Because I wanna tell them that they suck at it.” And the press was also merciless, as when reporter Charlie Gasparino urged, “the SEC should be disbanded.”

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The Impact of Venture Capital Monitoring

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, January 30, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Shai Bernstein of the Finance Area at Stanford University, Xavier Giroud of the Finance Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard Townsend of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

It is often argued that venture capital (VC) plays an important role in promoting innovation and growth. Consistent with this belief, governments around the world have pursued a number of policies aimed at fostering local venture capital activity. The goal of these policies has been to replicate the success of regions like Silicon Valley in the United States. However, there remains scarce evidence that the activities of venture capitalists actually play a causal role in stimulating the creation of innovative and successful companies. Indeed, venture capitalists may simply select companies that are poised to innovate and succeed, even absent their involvement. In this case, efforts by policy-makers to foster local venture capital activity would be misguided. In our paper, The Impact of Venture Capital Monitoring: Evidence from a Natural Experiment, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether the activities of venture capitalists do indeed affect portfolio company outcomes.

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Basel Leverage Ratio: No Cover for US Banks

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, January 30, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Dan Ryan, Leader of the Financial Services Advisory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. This post is based on a PwC publication, titled “Basel leverage ratio: No cover for US banks;” the full document, including appendices, is available here.

On January 12, 2014 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel Committee) issued the near final version of its leverage ratio and disclosure guidance (B3LR). The B3LR will be subject to further calibration until 2017 with final implementation expected by January 1, 2018.

The B3LR makes a number of significant changes to the Basel Committee’s June 2013 consultative paper (Consultative Paper) by easing the approach to measuring the exposures of off-balance sheet items. These changes address the industry’s concern that the Consultative Paper’s definition of exposure was too expansive (i.e., the leverage ratio’s denominator was too large).

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ISS QuickScore 2.0

Posted by David A. Katz, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
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David A. Katz is a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz specializing in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and complex securities transactions. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Katz, Sabastian V. Niles, and Francis J. Stapleton; the complete publication, including annex, is available here.

Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) has announced the governance factors and other technical specifications underlying its new Governance QuickScore 2.0 product, which ISS will apply to publicly traded companies for the 2014 proxy season. Companies have until 8pm ET on Friday, February 7th to verify the underlying raw data and can submit updates and corrections through ISS’s data review and verification site. ISS will release company ratings on Tuesday, February 18th, and the scores will be included in proxy research reports issued to institutional shareholders. While previous QuickScore ratings remained static between annual meeting periods, ISS has now committed to update ratings on an on-going basis based on a company’s public disclosures throughout the calendar year.

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Non-Compete Provisions in CEO Contracts

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Michael S. Katzke, a founding partner of Katzke & Morgenbesser LLP, and is based on a Katzke & Morgenbesser publication by Mr. Katzke and Henry I. Morgenbesser.

In negotiating the terms of a CEO employment arrangement, arguably the most important term for the board of directors of the employer is the non-competition (or non-compete) provision. A recent study by three business and law school professors (Bishara, N., Martin, K, and Thomas, R., When Do CEOs Have Covenants Not to Compete in Their Employment Contracts? (October 18, 2012) Ross School of Business) has found that, in spite of concerns by commentators that CEOs often have bargaining leverage over employers, there has been a significant upward trend over time in the use of non-compete provisions in new and restated CEO contracts. The study found usage of non-competes peaked in 2008 (89%) and in 2010 was at approximately 79%, up from 60-65% in the early 1990s.

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Indexing Executive Compensation Contracts

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Ingolf Dittmann, Professor of Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam; Ernst Maug, Professor of Finance at the University of Mannheim; and Oliver Spalt of the Department of Finance at Tilburg University.

Standard principal-agent theory prescribes that managers should not be compensated on exogenous risks, such as general market movements. Rather, firms should index pay and use contracts that filter exogenous risks (e.g., Holmstrom 1979, 1982; Diamond and Verrecchia 1982). This prescription is intuitive and agrees with common sense: CEOs should receive exceptional pay only for exceptional performance, and “rational” compensation practice should not permit CEOs to obtain windfall profits in rising stock markets. However, observed compensation contracts are typically not indexed. Specifically, stock options almost never tie the strike price of the option to an index that reflects market performance or the performance of peers. Commentators often cite this glaring difference between theory and practice as evidence for the inefficiency of executive compensation practice and, more generally, as evidence for major deficiencies of corporate governance in U.S. firms (e.g., Rappaport and Nodine 1999; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2001; Bebchuk and Fried 2004). This paper therefore contributes to the discussion about which compensation practices reveal deficiencies in the pay-setting process.

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White Collar and Regulatory Enforcement Trends in 2014

Posted by John F. Savarese & Wayne M. Carlin, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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John F. Savarese and Wayne M. Carlin are partners in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton firm memorandum by Mr. Savarese, Mr. Carlin, Ralph M. Levene, David Gruenstein, and David M. Murphy.

Last year, in our annual survey (discussed on the Forum here) of the white collar and regulatory enforcement landscape, we noted that the trend toward ever more aggressive prosecutions reflected a “gloomy picture” for large companies facing such investigations. Our assessment remains the same, as the pattern of imposing massive fines and extracting huge financial settlements from companies continued unabated in 2013. For example, on November 17, 2013, DOJ announced that it had reached a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan to resolve claims arising out of the marketing and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities—the largest settlement with a single entity in American history. Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay more than $2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil investigations into off-label drug marketing and the payment of kickbacks to doctors and pharmacists. Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $1.9 billion to settle claims by the Federal Housing Finance Agency that it made misleading disclosures about mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. SAC Capital entered a guilty plea to insider trading charges and was subjected to a $1.8 billion financial penalty—the largest insider trading penalty in history. And in the fourth largest FCPA case ever, French oil company Total S.A. agreed to pay $398 million in penalties and disgorgement for bribing an Iranian official. Not to be outdone, the SEC announced that it had recovered a record $3.4 billion in monetary sanctions in the 2013 fiscal year.

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CFTC Issues Cross-Border Substituted Compliance Determinations

Posted by Annette L. Nazareth, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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Annette Nazareth is a partner in the Financial Institutions Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, and a former commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The following post is based on a Davis Polk client memorandum. The complete publication, including appendices, is available here.

Just one day in advance of the December 21, 2013 expiration of the CFTC’s exemptive order delaying the applicability of some CFTC swap regulations for non-U.S. swap dealers and foreign branches of U.S. swap dealers, the CFTC approved a series of comparability determinations. These comparability determinations will allow CFTC-registered non-U.S. swap dealers and foreign branches of U.S. swap dealers to comply with local requirements rather than the corresponding CFTC rules in cases where substituted compliance is available under the CFTC’s cross-border guidance. [1] The CFTC made comparability determinations for some swap dealer entity-level requirements for Australia, Canada, the European Union (the “EU”), Hong Kong, Japan and Switzerland and for a limited number of transaction-level requirements for the EU and Japan.

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Canadian Governance Insights from 2013

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Berl Nadler, partner at Davies, Ward, Phillips & Vineberg LLP, and is based on the executive summary of a Davies publication, titled “Governance Insights 2013,” available here.

This third annual edition of Governance Insights presents Davies’ analysis of the corporate governance practices of Canadian public companies over the course of 2013 and the trends and issues that influenced and shaped them.

We expect 2014 to be an active year for governance themes with greater calls for diversity on boards, a growing shareholder voice on “say on pay” resolutions, and further regulatory initiatives around proxy voting and the regulation of proxy advisory firms. We also anticipate continued discussion on shareholder activism and scrutiny of the tools and strategies used by issuers and shareholders.

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