Monthly Archives: August 2015

The CEO Pay Ratio Rule

Posted by Luis A. Aguilar, Commissioner, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Wednesday, August 5, 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 remarks at a recent open meeting of the SEC; 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 [August 5, 2015], the Commission takes another step to fulfill its Congressional mandate to provide better disclosure for investors regarding executive compensation at public companies. As required by Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, today’s rules would require a public company to disclose the ratio of the total compensation of its chief executive officer (“CEO”) to the median total compensation received by the rest of its employees. The hope, quite simply, is that this information will better equip shareholders to promote accountability for the executive compensation practices of the companies that they own.

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Dissenting Statement on Pay Ratio Disclosure

Posted by Michael S. Piwowar, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
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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 recent remarks at a recent open meeting of the SEC. The complete publication, including footnotes, is available here. 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.

When the pay ratio disclosure rule was originally proposed, I objected to its consideration on the grounds that the Commission and its staff should not spend our limited resources on any rulemaking that unambiguously harms investors, negatively affects competition, promotes inefficiencies, and restricts capital formation—especially when there is no statutory deadline for completion. Pursuing a pay ratio rulemaking was wrong then and remains wrong now.

Today’s [August 5, 2015] rulemaking implements a provision of the highly partisan Dodd-Frank Act that pandered to politically-connected special interest groups and, independent of the Act, could not stand on its own merits. I am incredibly disappointed the Commission is stepping into that fray.

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Corporate Investment in ESG Practices

Posted by Matteo Tonello, The Conference Board, Inc., on
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
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Matteo Tonello is managing director at The Conference Board, Inc. This post relates to an issue of The Conference Board’s Director Notes series and was authored by Mr. Tonello and Thomas Singer. The complete publication, including footnotes and Appendix, is available here.

Corporate investment in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices has been widely investigated in recent years. Studies show that a business corporation may benefit from these resource allocations on multiple levels, ranging from higher market and accounting performance to improved reputation and stakeholder relations. However, poor data quality and the lack of a universally adopted framework for the disclosure of extra-financial information have hindered the field of research. This post reviews empirical analyses of the return on investment in ESG initiatives, outlines five pillars of the business case for corporate sustainability, and discusses why the positive correlations found by some academics remain disputed by others.

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Prices and Informed Trading

Posted by Vyacheslav Fos, Boston College, on
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
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Vyacheslav Fos is Assistant Professor of Finance at Boston College. This post is based on an article by Professor Fos and Pierre Collin-Dufresne, Professor of Finance at the Swiss Finance Institute. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes Pre-Disclosure Accumulations by Activist Investors: Evidence and Policy by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Robert J. Jackson Jr., and Wei Jiang; and The Law and Economics of Blockholder Disclosure by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert J. Jackson Jr. (discussed on the Forum here).

In our paper, Do Prices Reveal the Presence of Informed Trading?, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, we study how empirical measures of stock illiquidity and of adverse selection respond to informed trading by activist shareholders.

An extensive body of theory suggests that stock illiquidity, as measured by the bid-ask spread and by the price impact of trades, should be increasing in the information asymmetry between market participants. An extensive empirical literature employing these illiquidity measures thus assumes that they capture information asymmetry. But, do these empirical measures of adverse selection actually increase with information asymmetry? To test this question one would ideally separate informed from uninformed trades ex-ante and measure their relative impact on price changes. However, since we generally do not know the traders’ information sets, this is hard to do in practice.

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New Guidance on Advance Notice By-Laws

Posted by Alexander M. Kaye, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, on
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
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Alexander M. Kaye is the Practice Group Leader of the Global Corporate Group of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP and is a partner resident in the New York office. This post is based on a Milbank client alert by Mr. Kaye, Dean W. Sattler, and Monica Arduini. 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.

Hill International, Inc. (“Hill”), a publicly traded company, and one of its stockholders, Opportunity Partners L.P. (“Opportunity”), recently engaged in a dispute regarding whether Opportunity had timely submitted two proposals for items of business for consideration and two director nominations for election at Hill’s 2015 annual meeting. On appeal from the Delaware Chancery Court, the Delaware Supreme Court was called on to analyze the interpretation and application of Hill’s advance notice by-law.

On July 2, 2015, in Hill International, Inc. v. Opportunity Partners L.P., [1] the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Chancery’s holding that: (i) Hill’s board of directors only set the date of its annual meeting of stockholders when it announced the actual date of its annual meeting in its 2015 proxy statement, rather than a range of possible dates provided in Hill’s proxy statement from the preceding year, and (ii) Opportunity’s proposals were timely submitted in compliance with Hill’s advance notice by-law.

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Independent Chair Proposals

Posted by Avrohom J. Kess, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, on
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
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Avrohom J. Kess is partner and head of the Public Company Advisory Practice at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. This post is based on a Simpson Thacher memorandum by Mr. Kess, Karen Hsu Kelley, and Yafit Cohn.

During the 2015 proxy season, 64 independent chair proposals were submitted to Russell 3000 companies, 62 of which reached a shareholder vote. This statistic is generally consistent with the number of proposals brought to a vote in 2014 and 2013, respectively. Issuers that received an independent chair proposal this year, however, may have found it more challenging to assess their chances of defeating the proposal, given that, for annual meetings occurring on or after February 1, 2015, Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (“ISS”) changed its voting policy with regard to independent chair proposals. ISS previously applied a more objective six-factor test, which gave issuers some measure of predictability and allowed them to conform their governance features to ISS’s guidelines in an attempt to obtain an “against” recommendation. This year, however, ISS replaced this policy with a balancing test that takes a more “holistic” approach, which appears to have resulted in an increase in ISS recommendations in favor of independent chair proposals. Interestingly, ISS’s increasing support of independent chair proposals has not had a material impact on the overall outcome of the voting results: only 3.2% of independent chair proposals passed this year, as compared to 5% and 8% in 2014 and 2013, respectively.

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Is Proxy Access Inevitable?

Posted by Holly J. Gregory, Sidley Austin LLP, on
Monday, August 3, 2015
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Holly J. Gregory is a partner and co-global coordinator of the Corporate Governance and Executive Compensation group at Sidley Austin LLP. The following post is based on a Sidley update by Ms. Gregory, John P. Kelsh, Thomas J. Kim, Rebecca Grapsas, and Claire H. Holland. The complete publication, including footnotes, is available here. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance about proxy access include Lucian Bebchuk’s The Case for Shareholder Access to the Ballot and The Myth of the Shareholder Franchise (discussed on the Forum here), and Private Ordering and the Proxy Access Debate by Lucian Bebchuk and Scott Hirst (discussed on the Forum here).

Efforts by shareholders to directly influence corporate decision-making are intensifying, as demonstrated by the significant increase over the past three years in financially focused shareholder activism and the more recent efforts by large institutional investors to encourage directors to “engage” with shareholders more directly.

Through the collective efforts of large institutional investors, including public and private pension funds, shareholders at a significant number of companies are likely within the next several years to gain the power to nominate a portion of the board without undertaking the expense of a proxy solicitation. By obtaining proxy access (the ability to include shareholder nominees in the company’s own proxy materials) activists and other shareholders will have an additional weapon in their arsenal to influence board decisions.
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Mutual Fund Flows When Managers Have Foreign-Sounding Names

Posted by Oliver Spalt, Tilburg University, on
Monday, August 3, 2015
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Oliver Spalt is Professor of Behavioral Finance at Tilburg University. This post is based on an article authored by Professor Spalt; Alok Kumar, Professor of Finance at the University of Miami; and Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi.

In our paper What’s in a Name? Mutual Fund Flows When Managers Have Foreign-Sounding Names, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, we show that name-induced stereotypes affect the investment choices of U.S. mutual fund investors. Managers with foreign-sounding names have about 10% lower annual fund flows, and this effect is stronger among funds with investor clienteles that are more likely to be suspicious of foreigners ex ante.

Our results are based on a novel, hand-collected dataset that contains measures of foreignness of a large sample of mutual fund managers. Specifically, we conduct an online survey in which we present US residents with almost 4,000 actual fund manager names for actively managed US equity funds that appear in the CRSP database from 1993 to 2011. We then ask survey participants to rate for each name, whether or not it sounds foreign to them. Using their responses, we obtain for each fund a measure of whether the name of its manager sounds foreign to an investor when heard, read in a fund prospectus, or when it is found on a mutual fund web site. We hypothesize that the perceived foreignness of a name might trigger social biases such as discrimination and stereotyping and, thus, influence the investment decisions of mutual fund investors. We match our new dataset with the universe of actively managed US equity funds in the CRSP database to test this hypothesis.

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DC Circuit Vacates SEC’s Application of Dodd-Frank Provision

Posted by Darrell S. Cafasso, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, on
Sunday, August 2, 2015
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Darrell S. Cafasso is a partner in the Litigation Group at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. This post is based on a Sullivan & Cromwell publication by Mr. Cafasso, Stephen H. Meyer, and Jennifer L. Sutton. The complete publication, including footnotes, is available here.

On July 14, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the “DC Circuit”) held that the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC” or “Commission”) could not employ certain remedial provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank” or the “Act”) to retroactively punish an investment adviser for conduct that occurred prior to enactment of the Act. The court’s decision not only casts doubt on numerous similar punishments previously levied by the SEC based on pre-enactment misconduct, but could provide a basis for institutions to object to certain sanctions sought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the “CFPB”).

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Fed’s Proposed Amendments to Capital Plan & Stress Test Rules

Posted by Dan Ryan, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, on
Saturday, August 1, 2015
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Dan Ryan is Leader of the Financial Services Advisory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. This post is based on a PwC publication by Mr. Ryan, Mike Alix, Adam Gilbert, and Armen Meyer.

On July 17th, the Federal Reserve Board (“Fed”) issued a proposed rule that provides some relief from capital stress testing requirements. [1] Most notably, it eliminates advanced approaches risk-weighted assets and tier 1 common capital (“T1C”) calculations from stress testing, and provides a one year delay in the application of the supplementary leverage ratio (“SLR”) to stress testing. The proposal also does not incorporate the G-SIB surcharge into stress testing at this stage—see PwC’s First take: Key points from the Fed’s final G-SIB surcharge rule (July 22, 2015)—and makes clear that no additional changes will be applied to next year’s stress testing cycle.

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