Asaf Eckstein

The Push Towards Corporate Guidelines

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In recent years, there has been a debate in the corporate world about the capabilities and incentives of institutional investors to invest in corporate stewardship – defined as monitoring, voting, and engagement – of their portfolio companies. The main focus has been on mutual funds, which hold most of the assets of institutional investors.

According to conventional wisdom, which finds support in theoretical and empirical studies, institutional investors are not active stewards for four reasons. First, managers of mutual funds have poor incentives to invest in active stewardship because of their compensation structure – a tiny fixed percentage of assets … Read more

Should Agents Operating in the U.S. Financial Markets Have “Skin in the Game”?

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The Literature on agency theory is largely focused on relationships in which one party (the principal) engages another party (the agent) to perform some service on the principal’s behalf, the performance of which involves delegating some decision making authority to the agent. This literature explains that when the principal and the agent do not share the same interests, a conflict may arise; an “agency problem.”[1] Generally speaking, two main governance devices have been suggested to help align the interests of principals and agents in order to eliminate conflicts of interest and thereby enhance the welfare of principals. The first … Read more