Monthly Archives: June 2015

Failing to Advance Diversity and Inclusion

Posted by Luis A. Aguilar, Commissioner, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Thursday, June 11, 2015
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Luis A. Aguilar is a Commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on Commissioner Aguilar’s recent public statement; the full text, including footnotes, is available here. The views expressed in the post are those of Commissioner Aguilar and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the other Commissioners, or the Staff.

Today [June 9, 2015], the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to take meaningful steps to advance diversity and inclusion in the financial services industry, as required by Section 342 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Accordingly, I have no choice but to dissent from the Final Interagency Policy Statement Establishing Joint Standards for Assessing the Diversity Policies and Practices of Entities Regulated by the Agencies (the “Final Policy Statement”) that was issued today by the SEC and a number of other financial regulators.

The financial services industry has a long history of failing to promote diversity in its workforce. The industry has consistently failed to recruit and retain a diverse workforce over the years, and the need is particularly acute at the executive and senior management levels. This lack of diversity has persisted despite the mounting evidence that diversity makes the American workforce more creative, more diligent, and more productive—and, thus, makes U.S. companies more profitable.

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Proxy Monitor 2015 Mid-Season Report

Posted by James R. Copland, Manhattan Institute, on
Thursday, June 11, 2015
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James R. Copland is the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy. The following post is based on a memorandum from the Proxy Monitor project, available here.

As we near the close of corporate America’s “proxy season”—the period between mid-April and mid-June when most large, publicly traded corporations in the United States hold annual meetings to vote on company business, including resolutions introduced by shareholders—a clear picture has begun to emerge. By May 27, 2015, 211 of the nation’s 250 largest companies by revenues, as listed by Fortune magazine and in the Manhattan Institute’s ProxyMonitor.org database, had filed proxy documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This post bases its analysis on those companies’ filings, as well as voting results for 186 of those companies that had held their annual meetings by May 22.

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Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Evidence from Corporate Boards

Posted by Mariassunta Giannetti, Stockholm School of Economics, on
Thursday, June 11, 2015
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Mariassunta Giannetti is Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. This post is based on an article by Professor Giannetti; Guanmin Liao, Associate Professor of Accounting at the School of Accountancy, Central University of Finance and Economics; and Xiaoyun Yu, Associate Professor of Finance at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Development economists have long warned about the costs for developing countries of the emigration of the best and brightest that decamp to universities and businesses in the developed world (Bhagwati, 1976). While this brain drain has attracted a considerable amount of economic research, more recently, arguments have been raised that the emigration of the brightest may actually benefit developing countries, because emigrants may eventually return with more knowledge and organizational skills. (See The Economist, May 26, 2011.) Thus, the brain drain may actually become a brain gain.

In our paper, Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Evidence from Corporate Boards, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, we demonstrate a specific channel through which the brain gain arising from return migration to emerging markets may benefit the overall economy: the brain gain in the corporate boards of publicly listed companies. Specifically, we highlight the effects of individuals with foreign experience joining the boards of directors on firms’ performance and corporate policies in China.

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“Dead Hand Proxy Puts”—What You Need to Know

Posted by F. William Reindel, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, on
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
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F. William Reindel is partner and member of the Corporate Department at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. This post is based on a Fried Frank publication authored by Mr. Reindel, Stuart H. Gelfond, Daniel J. Bursky, and Gail Weinstein. 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.

There has been much recent concern and confusion over the inclusion of “dead hand proxy puts” (and even proxy puts without a “dead hand” feature) in debt agreements. Dead hand proxy puts (sometimes called “poison puts” or “board change of control provisions”) provide a type of change of control protection that banks, as well as parties to many types of non-debt commercial agreements, have frequently utilized, without controversy. Nonetheless, dead hand proxy puts are now under attack. While proxy puts without a dead hand feature are generally not being challenged, based on recent case law, these provisions in most cases will not permit a bank to accelerate the debt on a change of control of the borrower’s board (as explained below).

Dead hand proxy puts. A proxy put permits the lender to accelerate debt if a majority of the borrower’s board becomes comprised of “non-continuing directors” over a short period of time (usually one or two years). “Continuing directors” are persons who were on the board when the debt contract was entered into or replacement directors who were approved by a majority of those directors or their approved replacements. The “dead hand” feature provides that any director elected as a result of an actual or threatened proxy contest will be considered a non-continuing director for purposes of the proxy put.

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CFO Narcissism and Financial Reporting Quality

Posted by Sean Wang, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
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Sean Wang is Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This post is based on an article by Professor Wang, Mark Lang, Professor of Accounting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Chad Ham and Nicholas Seybert, both of the Department of Accounting & Information Assurance at the University of Maryland.

In Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, the author details the collapse of the Enron empire and places the majority of the blame on their CFO, Andrew Fastow. Fastow is credited with being responsible for engineering the special purpose entities, which hid the majority of Enron’s debt from their balance sheets. The excess leverage created risks that were opaque to Enron’s shareholders, and were largely responsible for Enron’s bankruptcy. Eichenwald’s interviews with Fastow’s colleagues portrayed him as a narcissist who would do anything for his own self-interest at the expense of the welfare of those around him.

In our paper, CFO Narcissism and Financial Reporting Quality, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether CFO narcissism can impact financial reporting outcomes. We focus on CFOs because of their primary role in financial reporting decisions. We conjecture that the traits of narcissism, which include exploitativeness, the domination of group decisions, a sense of self-entitlement, inflated self-perceptions, and a constant need for recognition, will result in narcissistic CFOs being more willing to exploit power and information asymmetry to engage in misreporting.

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Fed Proposes Amended Bank Liquidity Rules

Posted by Andrew R. Gladin, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, on
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
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Andrew R. Gladin is a partner in the Financial Services and Corporate and Finance Groups at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. This post is based on a Sullivan & Cromwell publication authored by Mr. Gladin, Samuel R. Woodall III, Andrea R. Tokheim, and Lauren A. Wansor.

On Thursday, May 21, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the “Federal Reserve”) issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (the “Proposal”) that would amend the final rule implementing a liquidity coverage ratio (“LCR”) requirement (the “Final LCR Rule”), [1] jointly adopted last September by the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”), to treat certain general obligation state and municipal bonds as high-quality liquid assets (“HQLA”). [2] Unlike the Final Rule, the OCC and FDIC did not join the Federal Reserve in issuing the Proposal. Accordingly, the Proposal would apply only to banking institutions regulated by the Federal Reserve that are subject to the LCR, absent further action by the other agencies. [3] The Proposal would allow these entities to treat general obligation securities of a public sector entity (“PSE”) as level 2B liquid assets, provided that the securities generally satisfy the same criteria as corporate debt securities that are classified as level 2B liquid assets, as well as certain other restrictions and limitations applicable only to these assets as described further below. Comments on the Proposal are due by July 24, 2015.

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Foreign Institutional Ownership and the Global Convergence of Financial Reporting

Posted by Vivian Fang, University of Minnesota, on
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
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Vivian Fang is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Minnesota. This post based on an article by Professor Fang, Mark Maffett, Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Chicago, and Bohui Zhang, Associate Professor at the School of Banking and Finance, University of New South Wales.

In our recent paper, Foreign Institutional Ownership and the Global Convergence of Financial Reporting Practices, forthcoming in the Journal of Accounting Research, we examine the role of foreign institutional investors in the global convergence of financial reporting practices. Regulators frequently espouse comparability as a desirable characteristic of financial reporting to facilitate investment decision-making and allocation of capital. Over the past 15 years, significant regulatory effort has gone into promoting comparability, the most prominent example of which is the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) push for global adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). However, recent research (e.g., Daske, Hail, Leuz, and Verdi [2008], Christensen, Hail, and Leuz [2013]) shows that mandating the use of a common set of accounting standards alone is unlikely to achieve financial reporting convergence.

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The SEC’s Current Views on Private Equity

Posted by Alfred O. Rose and Randall W. Bodner, Ropes & Gray LLP, on
Monday, June 8, 2015
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Alfred O. Rose and Randall W. Bodner are partners at Ropes & Gray LLP. This post is based on a Ropes & Gray publication.

As a follow-up to last year’s “Spreading Sunshine in Private Equity” speech, in which then-OCIE Director Andrew Bowden stated that the SEC had found that more than half of the funds examined by OCIE had allocated expenses and collected fees inappropriately and identified “lack of transparency” as a pervasive issue in the private equity industry, Marc Wyatt delivered a speech on May 13, 2015, reflecting on progress in the past year as well as identifying likely areas of scrutiny the private equity industry will face in the future. Although the speech has been widely reported, we wanted to highlight particular areas of interest. In this post, we examine the key takeaways from the speech, and outline best practices for the private equity industry going forward.

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Harmony or Dissonance? The Good Governance Ideas of Academics and Worldly Players

Posted by Robert C. Clark, Harvard Law School, on
Monday, June 8, 2015
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Robert C. Clark is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard Law School. His article, Harmony or Dissonance? The Good Governance Ideas of Academics and Worldly Players, was recently published in the Spring 2015 issue of The Business Lawyer and is available here.

There are numerous players who have ideas about what are good or best corporate governance practices, but different players have different themes. My article, Harmony or Dissonance? The Good Governance Ideas of Academics and Worldly Players, originally delivered as a special lecture and recently published in The Business Lawyer, asks questions concerning ideas about what constitutes good corporate governance that are espoused by different players.

The article dwells briefly on seven categories of players: (1) academics, such as financial economists and law professors who resort heavily to empirical studies; and more worldly players such as (2) legislators, (3) governance rating firms, (4) large institutional investors, (5) corporate directors, (6) law firms that represent corporate clients on the defensive, and (7) courts. Are there discernible trends and patterns in the views espoused by these different categories of actors, despite all the differences among individual actors within each category? I believe there are such patterns, and offer some initial thoughts about the characteristic themes and different patterns of ideas about good corporate governance that we observe among the different categories of players. I then hypothesize about the reasons for these differences. My approach focuses on the motives and incentives driving the different players and how they take shape in the occupational situations inhabited by the players.

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SEC Proposes Amendments to Form ADV & Investment Advisers Act

Posted by Jessica Forbes, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, on
Sunday, June 7, 2015
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Jessica Forbes is a partner in the Corporate Practice at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP. This post is based on a Fried Frank memorandum by Ms. Forbes and Stacey Song.

On May 20, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) published for comment proposed amendments to Form ADV and certain rules promulgated under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended (the “Advisers Act”). [1] The proposed amendments to Form ADV relate to Part 1A, which, although available on the SEC’s website, is not required to be delivered to clients. The SEC proposes to (1) require investment advisers to provide additional information on their Form ADV Part 1A, including information about their separately managed account (“SMA”) business; (2) incorporate a method for private fund adviser entities operating a single advisory business to register using a single Form ADV; (3) require investment advisers to maintain records that demonstrate performance calculations or rates of return in any written communications, and maintain originals of all written communications received and copies of written communications sent related to the performance or rate of return of all managed accounts or securities recommendations; and (4) make clarifying, technical, and other amendments to Form ADV and Advisers Act rules.

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