The future of corporate stewardship – and therefore corporate governance – rests in the hands of a few large institutional investors.[1] Questions of whether these funds have the necessary incentives to pursue stewardship have set off an explosion of …

Why are large private companies often characterized by poor corporate governance?  WeWork provides a recent high-profile example.  For reasons that now seem implausible, WeWork attracted billions of investment dollars.  Perhaps it was the company’s “vision” or the sheer personality of …

In late 2019, somewhat surprisingly, the Business Roundtable issued a brief statement advocating “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” thus ending its decades long singular commitment to shareholder value.

The statement triggered an intense global debate about the …

Disclosure and internal governance regulations are, along with accounting rules, distinguishing features of the public firm.  Deregulation agendas such as those of the Trump administration typically assume that many regulations on public firms have imposed high compliance costs.  Such arguments …

What do the emergence of independent directors in South Korea, the legal reforms on related-party transactions in India, the continued rise of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in the United States, and the global spread of corporate governance codes …

In our recent paper, Can Governance Help in Making an IPO “Successful”? New Evidence from Europe, we find that corporate governance affects company performance after an IPO in different ways.  We consider an IPO to be successful if it …

The European Commission retained Ernst & Young (“EY”) to undertake a detailed study of “short-termism” and, implicitly, to report whether it was a major roadblock to more sustainable corporate governance. Their study was then presented at a three day international …

[The following remarks, delivered on October 29, 2020, opened the first session of the three-part Conference on Racial Equality in Corporate Governance co-sponsored by the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School.]

I …