2023 Corporate Governance Symposium
- 17 March 2023
- •
- University of Delaware, Newark, USA
2023 Corporate Governance Symposium
and
John L. Weinberg/IRRCi Research Paper Award Competition
University of Delaware Lerner College of Business & Economics
Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance and ECGI
Friday, 17 March 2023 | 08:45 – 16:15 EDT | 13:45 – 21:15 CET
Location: University of Delaware, Newark, USA
ABOUT THE EVENT
The John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance and the Department of Finance at the Lerner College of Business & Economics at the University of Delaware hosted an in-person Academic Symposium in collaboration with the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) on Friday, 17 March 2023. The University of Delaware is located in Newark, Delaware, 40 minutes from the Philadelphia International Airport.
Academics and Practitioners were invited to submit papers by 18 November 2022 for consideration. All submissions related to corporate governance were welcomed. Two of the papers selected will each receive the 2023 John L. Weinberg/IRRCi Research Paper Award and a $10,000 prize. Details of past year's programme and award winners are available here.
This research competition is the successor to the IRRCi Investor Research Paper Award, a prominent award garnering significant attention amongst the investment community, academia and policymakers. The John L. Weinberg/IRRCi Research Paper Award, as its predecessor did, highlights innovative research.
Please note that the selection of winners/finalists, if any, is at the sole discretion of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance. The Weinberg Center fully awarded two $10,000 prizes.
Conference Location: Clayton Conference Center (U. of Delaware), 100 David Hallowell Dr., Newark, DE 19716
General inquiries regarding the competition or the Symposium should be directed to Louisa Cresson at Weinberg-corp-gov@udel.edu.
Information
Friday, 17 March 2023 | 08:00 EDT (13:00 CET)
Breakfast
Introductions
Speakers:
Session 1 | Chaired by
Speakers:
Proxy Exempt Solicitation Campaigns
Paper: Proxy Exempt Solicitation Campaigns
Authors: Dipesh Bhattarai (Tennessee), Brian Blank (Mississippi State), Tingting Liu (Iowa State), Kathryn Schumann-Foster (SEC), Tracie Woidtke (Tennessee)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups
Speakers:
Discussant:
Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups
Paper: Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups
Authors: Bo Bian (UBC), Yingxiang Li (UBC), Casimiro A. Nigro (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Session 2 | Chaired by
Speakers:
The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-based Compensation
Speakers:
Discussant:
The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-based Compensation
Paper: The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-based Compensation
Authors: Lucian A. Bebchuk (Harvard Law), Roberto Tallarita (Harvard Law)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Firms' Decisions Where to Incorporate
This paper empirically investigates the decisions of publicly traded firms where to incorporate. We study the features of states that make them...
Read more
Dancing with Activists
An important milestone often reached in the life of an activist engagement is entering into a “settlement” agreement between the activist and the...
Read more
Competing Views on the Economic Structure of Corporate Law
Written for a symposium issue celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the publication of The Economic Structure of Corporate Law by Frank...
Read more
How Twitter Pushed Stakeholders Under The Bus
This study focusses on the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. Our analysis indicates that when negotiating the sale of their company to Musk,...
Read more
The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-Based Compensation
With the rising support for stakeholder capitalism and at the urging of its advocates, companies have been increasingly using environmental, social,...
Read more
Will Corporations Deliver Value to All Stakeholders?
Supporters of stakeholder governance advocate relying on corporate leaders to use their discretion to protect stakeholders, and they seem to take...
Read more
Does Enlightened Shareholder Value Add Value?
Unlike shareholder value maximization (SV), which merely calls on corporate leaders to maximize shareholder value, enlightened shareholder value...
Read more
Takeover Bids vs. Proxy Fights in Contests for Corporate Control
This paper evaluates the primary mechanisms for changing management or obtaining control in publicly traded corporations with dispersed ownership....
Read moreFast and Furious Session | Chaired by
Speakers:
CEO Activism and Firm Value
Speakers:
CEO Activism and Firm Value
Paper: CEO Activism and Firm Value
Authors: Anahit Mkrtchyan (UMass-Amherst), Jason Sandvik (Arizona), Vivi Z. Zhu (Southern Methodist)
Speakers
Conference Documents
Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?
Speakers:
Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?
Paper: Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?
Authors: Hoa Briscoe-Tran (Ohio State)
Speakers
Conference Documents
Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions
Speakers:
Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions
Paper: Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions
Authors: Tor-Erik Bakke (U. of Illinois – Chicago), Mathias Kronlund (Tulane), Hamed Mahmudi (Delaware), Aazam Virani (Arizona)
Speakers
Lunch Break
Session 3 | Chaired by
Speakers:
Socially Responsible Divestment
Paper: Socially Responsible Divestment
Authors: Alex Edmans (LBS), Doron Levit (U. Washington), Jan Schneemeier (Indiana University)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Advising the Management: A Theory of Shareholder Engagement
We study the effectiveness of shareholder engagement, that is, shareholders communicating their views to management. When shareholders and...
Read more
Governance Under Common Ownership
Conventional wisdom is that diversification weakens governance by spreading an investor too thinly. We show that, when an investor owns multiple firms...
Read more
Who’s Paying Attention? Measuring Common Ownership and Its Impact on Managerial Incentives
We derive a measure that captures the extent to which common ownership shifts managers’ incentives to internalize externalities. A key feature of the...
Read more
Common Ownership and The Decline of the American Worker
The last forty years have seen two major economic trends: Wages have stalled despite rising productivity, and institutional investors have replaced...
Read more
The Voting Premium
This paper develops a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium. It explains how and why a voting premium emerges in the absence of...
Read more
Corporate Governance Implications of the Growth in Indexing
Passively managed funds have grown to become some of the largest shareholders in publicly traded companies, but there is considerable debate about the...
Read more
Irrelevance of Governance Structure
Does corporate governance structure matter for firm value? We develop a model in which the allocation of control rights between shareholders and...
Read more
Trading and Shareholder Democracy
We study shareholder voting in a model in which trading affects the composition of the shareholder base. Trading and voting are complementary, which...
Read moreSession 4 | Chaired by
Speakers:
Proxy Voting and the Rise of ESG
Paper: Proxy Voting and the Rise of ESG
Authors: Patrick Bolton (Imperial College), Enrichetta Ravina (Chicago Fed), Howard Rosenthal (NYU), Chris Tausanovitch (UCLA)
Speakers
Discussants
Investor Ideology
We estimate institutional investor preferences from proxy voting records. The W-NOMINATE method maps investors onto a left-right dimension based on...
Read more
The Limits of Limited Liability: Evidence from Industrial Pollution
We study how parent liability for subsidiaries’ environmental cleanup costs affects industrial pollution and production. Our empirical setting...
Read more
Noisy Factors
The Fama-French factors are ubiquitous in empirical finance. We find that factor returns differ substantially depending on when the data were...
Read moreFemale Equity Analysts and Corporate Environmental and Social Performance
Speakers:
Discussant:
Female Equity Analysts and Corporate Environmental and Social Performance
Paper: Female Equity Analysts and Corporate Environmental and Social Performance
Authors: Kai Li (UBC), Feng Mai (Steven Institute of Technology), Gabriel Wong (Cardiff), Chelsea Yang (UBC), Tengfei Zhang (Rutgers)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Concluding Remarks
Speakers:
Speakers
Presentations
Introductions
Introductions
Speakers
Proxy Exempt Solicitation Campaigns
Proxy Exempt Solicitation Campaigns
Paper: Proxy Exempt Solicitation Campaigns
Authors: Dipesh Bhattarai (Tennessee), Brian Blank (Mississippi State), Tingting Liu (Iowa State), Kathryn Schumann-Foster (SEC), Tracie Woidtke (Tennessee)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups
Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups
Paper: Conflicting Fiduciary Duties and Fire Sales of VC-backed Start-ups
Authors: Bo Bian (UBC), Yingxiang Li (UBC), Casimiro A. Nigro (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Session 2 | Chaired by
Session 2 | Chaired by
Speakers
The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-based Compensation
The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-based Compensation
Paper: The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-based Compensation
Authors: Lucian A. Bebchuk (Harvard Law), Roberto Tallarita (Harvard Law)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, and Policy
Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor,...
Read more
Competing Views on the Economic Structure of Corporate Law
Written for a symposium issue celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the publication of The Economic Structure of Corporate Law by Frank...
Read more
Does Enlightened Shareholder Value Add Value?
Unlike shareholder value maximization (SV), which merely calls on corporate leaders to maximize shareholder value, enlightened shareholder value...
Read more
The Specter of the Giant Three
This Article examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global...
Read more
Dancing with Activists
An important milestone often reached in the life of an activist engagement is entering into a “settlement” agreement between the activist and the...
Read more
How Twitter Pushed Stakeholders Under The Bus
This study focusses on the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. Our analysis indicates that when negotiating the sale of their company to Musk,...
Read more
The Wages of Failure: Executive Compensation at Bear Stearns and Lehman 2000-2008
The standard narrative of the meltdown of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers assumes that the wealth of the top executives of these firms was largely wiped...
Read more
Stakeholder Capitalism in the Time of COVID
This Article tests the claims of supporters of stakeholder capitalism (“stakeholderism”) in the context of the COVID pandemic. Supporters of...
Read moreFast and Furious Session | Chaired by
Fast and Furious Session | Chaired by
Speakers
Bucking the Trend: Why do IPOs Choose Controversial Governance Structures and Why Do Investors Let Them
While the percentage of mature firms with classified boards or dual class shares has declined by more than 40% since 1990, the percentage of IPO firms with...
Read moreCEO Activism and Firm Value
CEO Activism and Firm Value
Paper: CEO Activism and Firm Value
Authors: Anahit Mkrtchyan (UMass-Amherst), Jason Sandvik (Arizona), Vivi Z. Zhu (Southern Methodist)
Speakers
Conference Documents
Corporate DEI Culture Spillover
Corporate DEI Culture Spillover
Paper: Corporate DEI Culture Spillover
Authors: Xiao Cen (Texas A&M), Yue Qiu (Temple), Tracy Yue Wang (Minnesota)
Speakers
Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?
Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?
Paper: Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?
Authors: Hoa Briscoe-Tran (Ohio State)
Speakers
Conference Documents
Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions
Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions
Paper: Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions
Authors: Tor-Erik Bakke (U. of Illinois – Chicago), Mathias Kronlund (Tulane), Hamed Mahmudi (Delaware), Aazam Virani (Arizona)
Speakers
Session 3 | Chaired by
Session 3 | Chaired by
Speakers
Socially Responsible Divestment
Socially Responsible Divestment
Paper: Socially Responsible Divestment
Authors: Alex Edmans (LBS), Doron Levit (U. Washington), Jan Schneemeier (Indiana University)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Trading and Shareholder Democracy
We study shareholder voting in a model in which trading affects the composition of the shareholder base. Trading and voting are complementary, which...
Read more
Irrelevance of Governance Structure
Does corporate governance structure matter for firm value? We develop a model in which the allocation of control rights between shareholders and...
Read more
Corporate Governance Implications of the Growth in Indexing
Passively managed funds have grown to become some of the largest shareholders in publicly traded companies, but there is considerable debate about the...
Read more
Common Ownership and The Decline of the American Worker
The last forty years have seen two major economic trends: Wages have stalled despite rising productivity, and institutional investors have replaced...
Read more
Voting Choice
Traditionally, fund managers cast votes on behalf of investors whose capital they manage. Recently, this system has come under intense debate given the...
Read more
Advising the Management: A Theory of Shareholder Engagement
We study the effectiveness of shareholder engagement, that is, shareholders communicating their views to management. When shareholders and...
Read more
The Voting Premium
This paper develops a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium. It explains how and why a voting premium emerges in the absence of...
Read more
Corporate Governance in the Presence of Active and Passive Delegated Investment
We examine the governance role of delegated portfolio managers. In our model, investors allocate their wealth between passive funds, active funds, and...
Read moreSession 4 | Chaired by
Session 4 | Chaired by
Speakers
Proxy Voting and the Rise of ESG
Proxy Voting and the Rise of ESG
Paper: Proxy Voting and the Rise of ESG
Authors: Patrick Bolton (Imperial College), Enrichetta Ravina (Chicago Fed), Howard Rosenthal (NYU), Chris Tausanovitch (UCLA)
Speakers
Discussants
Noisy Factors
The Fama-French factors are ubiquitous in empirical finance. We find that factor returns differ substantially depending on when the data were...
Read more
The Limits of Limited Liability: Evidence from Industrial Pollution
We study how parent liability for subsidiaries’ environmental cleanup costs affects industrial pollution and production. Our empirical setting...
Read more
Investor Ideology
We estimate institutional investor preferences from proxy voting records. The W-NOMINATE method maps investors onto a left-right dimension based on...
Read moreFemale Equity Analysts and Corporate Environmental and Social Performance
Female Equity Analysts and Corporate Environmental and Social Performance
Paper: Female Equity Analysts and Corporate Environmental and Social Performance
Authors: Kai Li (UBC), Feng Mai (Steven Institute of Technology), Gabriel Wong (Cardiff), Chelsea Yang (UBC), Tengfei Zhang (Rutgers)
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Concluding Remarks
Speakers
Employee-Manager Alliances and Shareholder Returns from Acquisitions
We examine the potential for management-worker alliances when employees have substantial voting rights, and how such alliances affect the balance of...
Read more
The Dark Side of Industry Tournament Incentives
We find that firms whose CEOs face stronger industry tournament incentives, measured by their pay gap relative to the highest industry CEO pay, engage in...
Read more
Does It Pay to Go Global in the Boardroom? The Effect of Foreign Directors on Corporate Governance and Performance
We examine the benefits and costs associated with foreign independent directors (FIDs) at U.S. corporations. We find that firms with FIDs make better...
Read more
Directors: Older and Wiser, or Too Old to Govern?
An unintended consequence of recent governance reforms in the U.S. is firms’ greater reliance on older director candidates, resulting in noticeable...
Read more
Trust, Incomplete Contracting, and Corporate Innovation
Innovation is a contract intensive economic activity in a world of incomplete contracts. We show that trust mitigates incomplete contracting and...
Read more
Common Business Group Affiliation, Media Reporting, and Firm Real Effects
We examine whether common business group affiliation affects media reporting on firms and whether firms experience any real effects as a result. We find...
Read more