In August 2019, in the Business Roundtable’s Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation (the “BRT Statement”), numerous major company CEOs announced their commitment to deliver value to all stakeholders and not just shareholders. Some observers viewed this event as a milestone and the Statement as reflecting a meaningful commitment to improve the treatment of stakeholders (the “Commitment Hypothesis”). Others, by contrast, including us in previous work, viewed the Statement as a PR move with little practical impact on stakeholders (the “PR Hypothesis”). Which hypothesis best explains the BRT Statement?

In a forthcoming article, Will Corporations Deliver Value to All Stakeholders?, we investigate the aftermath of the BRT Statement to assess whether joining it represented a meaningful commitment or was mostly a public-relations move.

Our analysis is based on a review of a large array of corporate documents of the 128 U.S. public companies that joined the original BRT Statement in August 2019 (the “BRT Companies”). We manually collected and analyzed over six hundred corporate documents, which we are making publicly available in an online archive, the BRT Corporate Purpose Archive. The documents include governance guidelines, bylaws, proxy statements, and SEC no-action letter requests, and cover the period through the end of August 2021, two full years after the publication of the BRT Statement (the “Two-Year Period”).

Our analysis of these documents provides considerable evidence inconsistent with the Commitment Hypothesis and in support of the PR Hypothesis. These findings, we argue, have significant implications for the heated debate on stakeholder capitalism.

Below is a more detailed account of our analysis:

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