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Program on Corporate Governance Advisory Board
- Peter Atkins
- David Bell
- Kerry E. Berchem
- Richard Brand
- Daniel Burch
- Paul Choi
- Jesse Cohn
- Arthur B. Crozier Christine Davine
- Renata J. Ferrari
- Andrew Freedman
- Ray Garcia
- Byron Georgiou
- Joseph Hall
- Jason M. Halper William P. Mills
- David Millstone
- Theodore Mirvis
- Philip Richter
- Elina Tetelbaum
- Sebastian Tiller
- Marc Trevino Jonathan Watkins
- Steven J. Williams
HLS Faculty & Senior Fellows
Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
Institutional Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme
Signs of the public’s appetite for alternative business forms, such as benefit corporations, [1] that blend profit with purpose include the success of get-one-give-one brands like Warby Parker, and Etsy’s recent $300 million IPO, which made it the second (and largest) B Corp to go public. The success of alternative business forms will also depend, […]
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Posted in Boards of Directors, Empirical Research, Institutional Investors
Tagged Alternative entities, Benefit corporation, Boards of Directors, Corporate forms, Fiduciary duties, Incorporations, Institutional Investors, Public benefit corporations, Public interest
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Shareholders Defeat Mandatory Deferral Proposal
Many large U.S. based multinational banking and financial services corporations have implemented executive compensation clawback policies that require the cancellation and forfeiture of unvested deferred cash awards or performance share unit awards. These policies typically condition the cancellation of deferred compensation if it is determined that an executive engaged in misconduct, including failure to supervise […]
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Posted in Banking & Financial Institutions, Corporate Elections & Voting, Executive Compensation, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Clawbacks, Equity-based compensation, Executive Compensation, Financial institutions, Misconduct, Shareholder voting
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Shareholder Involvement in the Director Nomination Process
Proxy access is the corporate governance cause célèbre in the 2015 U.S. proxy season. There has been a concerted push on the part of institutional shareholders and others to convince companies to adopt proxy access, most commonly in the form of a trigger of 3% of outstanding voting shares held for 3 years. Shareholders have […]
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Posted in Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, International Corporate Governance & Regulation, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Board composition, Boards of Directors, Canada, Director nominations, Engagement, International governance, Proxy access, Proxy materials, Proxy season, Proxy voting, Shareholder communications, Shareholder nominations
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Financing Payouts
The established conventional wisdom in the finance literature is that firms rely on free cash flow to fund their payouts, whether these payouts are motivated by agency, signaling, or other considerations. In a popular finance textbook, Ross, Westfield, and Jaffe (2013) conclude that “a firm should begin making distributions when it generates sufficient internal cash […]
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Posted in Academic Research
Tagged Capital structure, Cash flows, Corporate debt, Cost of capital, Dividends, External financing, Payouts, Repurchases
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CEO Visibility: Are Media Stars Born or Made?
In our paper, CEO Visibility: Are Media Stars Born or Made?, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we investigate whether CEOs and/or their firms can use strategic disclosure to affect media coverage of the CEO. We predict that CEOs and/or firms can reduce journalists’ direct production costs via strategic “CEO promotion” in firm […]
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Posted in Academic Research, Accounting & Disclosure, Empirical Research
Tagged Disclosure, Entrenchment, Management, Public perception, Reputation, Signaling
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Lazard v. Qinetiq: Important Lessons for Structuring Earn-Outs
A recent Delaware Supreme Court case authored by Chief Justice Strine upholds the literal meaning of an earn-out provision that limited the buyer from taking action “intended to reduce or limit an earn-out payment.” The court rejected the argument that buyer’s actions, which it likely knew would reduce the likelihood of an earn-out payment, met […]
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Posted in Court Cases, Mergers & Acquisitions, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Acquisition agreements, Corporate disputes, Covenants, Delaware cases, Delaware law, Duty of good faith, Earnouts, Merger litigation, Mergers & acquisitions
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Are Companies Impermissibly Bundling Proposals for Shareholder Votes?
Recognizing that shareholders face a distorted set of choices when management “bundles” more than one separate item into the same proxy proposal, in 1992 the SEC enacted a pair of rules meant to protect shareholders from this practice. Bundling deprives shareholders of the right to convey their views on each separate matter being put to […]
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Posted in Academic Research, Corporate Elections & Voting, Securities Regulation
Tagged Bundling, Proxy voting, SEC rulemaking, Securities regulation, Shareholder rights, Shareholder voting
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Fed Supervision: DC in the Driver’s Seat
On April 17th, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (“Fed”) issued a better-late-than-never Supervisory Letter, SR 15-7, describing its governance structure for supervising systemically important financial institutions under its so-called Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee (“LISCC”). [1] Though much of the structure has been in place for years, the Fed had not […]
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Posted in Banking & Financial Institutions, Financial Regulation, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Banks, Federal Reserve, Financial institutions, Financial regulation, SIFIs, Systemic risk
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