George S. Georgiev

The “S” in ESG: Human Capital Management

By by

Over the past decade, ESG has morphed from a fringe concern into one of the most prominent topics in corporate governance – and a flourishing research area as well.[1] Nevertheless, some notable blindspots remain. Based on a recent survey, the vast majority of legal ESG scholarship limits the analysis to just two ESG factors: (1) climate risk, and (2) corporate diversity. These are hugely important issues, but a close look at developments on the ground reveals that there is a lot more to ESG. As it is practiced today, ESG also covers a wide range of matters related to … Read more

The Breakdown of the Public–Private Divide in Securities Law

By by

Securities law in the United States has traditionally been designed around a set of lines – the “public–private divide” – which separate public companies, public capital, and public markets from private companies, private capital, and private markets. Until the early 2000s, the lines were successful in establishing two largely coherent legal realms – a highly regulated public realm and a lightly regulated private realm – with investor protection by way of disclosure and governance obligations limited to the public realm. A series of bold and often-inconsistent reforms, however, has transformed this longstanding regime into a low-friction system where public capital … Read more

Securities Disclosure As Soundbite: The Case of CEO Pay Ratios

By and by

Since 2018, U.S. public companies have had to calculate and report a new, unconventional statistic—a CEO pay ratio—which links CEO pay to the pay of rank-and-file workers. Based on a last-minute addition to the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, the disclosure requirement generated significant controversy during the lengthy SEC rulemaking process. Companies and their executive compensation consultants spent years and considerable resources preparing to comply with the rule. Once the pay ratio figures started arriving in 2018, they captured public imagination in ways that the typically long and technical corporate disclosure documents never do. The sizeable pay gaps highlighted by the … Read more