Short-Termism in European Corporate Governance
- 30 May 2023
- •
- Antwerp, Belgium
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University of Antwerp - Harvard Law School - ECGI Conference
"Short-termism in European corporate governance"
Hosted by University of Antwerp, Belgium
Tuesday, 30 May 2023 | 09:00 - 18:10 CEST
Location:
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Organisers
Tom Vos, University of Antwerp
Mark Roe, Harvard Law School and ECGI
Supported by
ABOUT THE EVENT
This conference aimed to improve the understanding in Europe of short-termism in corporate governance, i.e., the preference for short-term profits against long-term value. Much of the current academic and societal debate on short-termism has focused on the US and the UK. However, corporate governance in Europe differs in a few fundamental respects from corporate governance in the US and the UK, including the important role that large reference shareholders typically play in European corporate governance. The conference aimed to bring together scholars and practitioners from outside and within Europe to reflect on the question whether corporate governance in Europe contributes to or discourages long-term thinking.
Location
University of Antwerp, room s.R.218, Rodestraat 14, 2000 Antwerp.
Information
TUESDAY, 30 MAY 2023 | 09:00 CEST
Introduction and Welcome
Speakers:
Keynote: Short-termism: What is it? And how big a problem is it?
Speakers:
Keynote: Short-termism: What is it? And how big a problem is it?
Speakers
Conference Documents
The Power of the Narrative in Corporate Lawmaking
The notion of stock-market-driven short-termism relentlessly whittling away at the American economy’s foundations is widely accepted and highly...
Read more
Containing Systemic Risk by Taxing Banks Properly
At the root of recurring bank crises are deeply-implanted incentives for banks and their executives to take systemically excessive risk. Since the...
Read more
Corporate Purpose and Corporate Competition
The large American corporation faces ever-rising pressure to pursue a purpose beyond shareholder profit. This rising pressure interacts with changes...
Read more
The European Commission's Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique
In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report...
Read more
Corporate Short-Termism - In the Boardroom and in the Courtroom
A long-held view in corporate circles has been that furious rapid trading in stock markets has been increasing in recent decades, justifying corporate...
Read more
What is Stock Market Short-Termism?
What precisely is stock market short-termism? For an issue that pervades corporate governance thinking, rhetoric, and policymaking, one would think...
Read more
Stock Market Short-Termism’s Impact
Stock-market–driven short-termism is crippling the American economy, according to legal, judicial, and media analyses. Firms forgo the R&D...
Read moreQ&A
Executive compensation and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Corporate Purpose: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations/Confusions
Does it matter if corporate leaders pursue a broader, social corporate purpose rather than a narrow, shareholder-centric one, and can legal and...
Read more
Indirect Investor Protection: The Investment Ecosystem and Its Legal Underpinnings
This paper argues that the key mechanisms protecting portfolio investors in public corporate securities are indirect. They do not rely on actions by the...
Read more
Monetary Liability for Breach of the Duty of Care?
This paper clarifies why optimal corporate governance generally excludes monetary liability for breach of directors? and managers? fiduciary duty of...
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
Cheap-Stock Tunneling Around Preemptive Rights
Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive...
Read more
On Inference When Using State Corporate Laws for Identification
A popular research design identifies the effects of corporate governance by (changes in) state laws, clustering standard errors by state of...
Read more
The European Commission's Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique
In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report...
Read moreCoffee Break
Controlling shareholders and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
The missing role of controlling shareholders in the short-termism debate
Corporate short-termism, i.e., corporations sacrificing long-term value for short-term profits, has received a lot of attention in the corporate...
Read morePanel Discussion: Loyalty shares
Moderator:
Panelists:
Panel Discussion: Loyalty shares
Moderator
Panelists
Lunch
Keynote: An overview of the evidence on corporate short-termism
Speakers:
Keynote: An overview of the evidence on corporate short-termism
Speakers
Conference Documents
Firm-level Climate Change Exposure
We develop a method that identifies the attention paid by earnings call participants to firms' climate change exposures. The method adapts a machine...
Read more
The Importance of Climate Risks for Institutional Investors
According to our survey about climate risk perceptions, institutional investors believe climate risks have financial implications for their...
Read more
Do Investors Care About Biodiversity?
This paper introduces a new measure of a firm's negative impact on biodiversity, the corporate biodiversity footprint, and studies whether it is priced...
Read more
Is History Repeating Itself? The (Un)predictable Past of ESG Ratings
The explosion in ESG research has led to a strong reliance on ESG rating providers. We document widespread changes to the historical ratings of a key...
Read more
ESG Shareholder Engagement and Downside Risk
We show that engagement on environmental, social, and governance issues can benefit shareholders by reducing firms’ downside risks. We find that the...
Read more
The Effects of Mandatory ESG Disclosure around the World
We compile a novel dataset on mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure around the world to analyze the stock liquidity effects...
Read more
Institutional Investors and Corporate Governance
We provide a comprehensive overview of the role of institutional investors in corporate governance with three main components. First, we establish...
Read more
Climate Risk Disclosure and Institutional Investors
Employing disclosure theory, we develop hypotheses regarding the preferences of institutional investors with respect to firms’ climate risk...
Read moreQ&A
Stewardship, activism and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Shareholder Sustainability Activism in the Netherlands
Corporations play a crucial role in achieving a sustainable world. In achieving corporate sustainability, the current regulatory frameworks...
Read more
The Viability of Blockchain in Corporate Governance
Blockchain technology, along with distributed ledger technologies (DLT), has gained recognition as a potential game-changer in corporate...
Read more
Shareholder Stewardship in the Netherlands: The Role of Institutional Investors in a Stakeholder Oriented Jurisdiction
We study institutional investors’ voice in the Netherlands, focusing on shareholder voting in particular. The Dutch Stewardship Code, developed by...
Read more
Blockchain Technology for Corporate Governance and Shareholder Activism
Blockchain is a technology that can offer smart solutions for classical corporate governance inefficiencies, especially in the relationship between...
Read more
Blockchain and Smart Contracting for the Shareholder Community
Current shareholder engagement systems face large classical inefficiencies. First, due to the large chains of intermediaries in the current...
Read more
Bringing the AGM to the 21st Century: Blockchain and Smart Contracting Tech for Shareholder Involvement
The AGM is often considered to play an important role in direct shareholder monitoring of directors and corporate blockholders. However, its practical...
Read moreCoffee Break
Shareholder pay-outs and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
The Effect of Minority Veto Rights on Controller Pay Tunneling
A central challenge in the regulation of controlled firms is curbing rent extraction by controllers. As independent directors and fiduciary duties are...
Read more
The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable (HFCA) Act: A Critique
The 2020 Holding Foreign Companies Accountable (HFCA) Act will force China-based firms to delist from U.S. exchanges if China fails to permit audit...
Read more
IPO Price Formation and Board Gender Diversity
In January 2020, Goldman Sachs announced that it would no longer underwrite the IPOs of firms with all-male boards, stating that gender-diverse board...
Read more
Cheap-Stock Tunneling Around Preemptive Rights
Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive...
Read more
Managerial Trustworthiness and Buybacks
CEO trustworthiness is positively related to long-term excess returns after buyback announcements. When the CEO is trustworthy, statements that the...
Read more
Short-Termism, Shareholder Payouts, and Investment in the EU
Investor-driven “short-termism” is said to harm EU public firms’ ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better...
Read more
Rights Offers and Delaware Law
Under Delaware law, a securities issuance in which all existing investors may participate pro rata (a “rights offer”) is often seen as treating...
Read more
Short-Termism and Capital Flows
During 2007-2016, S&P 500 firms distributed to shareholders $7 trillion via buybacks and dividends, over 96% of their aggregate net income,...
Read more
Quarterly reporting and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Is Pollution Value-Maximizing? The DuPont Case
Litigation, regulation, and reputation are the key mechanisms to restrain companies from profiting by externalizing larger costs on society. We...
Read more
Compliance Gatekeepers
What determines the effectiveness of corporate compliance programs, and who is accountable when they fail? Scholars and policymakers tend to answer...
Read more
Specialist Directors
What determines the effectiveness of corporate boards? Corporate legal scholars usually approach this question by focusing on directors’...
Read more
The Power of the Narrative in Corporate Lawmaking
The notion of stock-market-driven short-termism relentlessly whittling away at the American economy’s foundations is widely accepted and highly...
Read morePanel of practitioners
Moderator:
Panelists:
Panel of practitioners
Moderator
Panelists
Wrap up
Speakers:
Speakers
Presentations
Introduction and Welcome
Speakers
Corporate Short-Termism - In the Boardroom and in the Courtroom
A long-held view in corporate circles has been that furious rapid trading in stock markets has been increasing in recent decades, justifying corporate...
Read more
Stock Market Short-Termism’s Impact
Stock-market–driven short-termism is crippling the American economy, according to legal, judicial, and media analyses. Firms forgo the R&D...
Read more
Structural Corporate Degradation Due to Too-Big-to-Fail Finance
Corporate governance incentives at too-big-to-fail financial firms deserve systematic examination. For industrial conglomerates that have grown...
Read more
The European Commission's Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique
In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report...
Read more
The missing role of controlling shareholders in the short-termism debate
Corporate short-termism, i.e., corporations sacrificing long-term value for short-term profits, has received a lot of attention in the corporate...
Read more
What is Stock Market Short-Termism?
What precisely is stock market short-termism? For an issue that pervades corporate governance thinking, rhetoric, and policymaking, one would think...
Read more
The Power of the Narrative in Corporate Lawmaking
The notion of stock-market-driven short-termism relentlessly whittling away at the American economy’s foundations is widely accepted and highly...
Read more
Dodge v. Ford: What Happened and Why?
Behind Henry Ford’s business decisions that led to the widely taught, famous-in-law-school Dodge v. Ford shareholder primacy decision were three...
Read moreKeynote: Short-termism: What is it? And how big a problem is it?
Speakers
Conference Documents
What is Stock Market Short-Termism?
What precisely is stock market short-termism? For an issue that pervades corporate governance thinking, rhetoric, and policymaking, one would think...
Read more
The Power of the Narrative in Corporate Lawmaking
The notion of stock-market-driven short-termism relentlessly whittling away at the American economy’s foundations is widely accepted and highly...
Read more
Containing Systemic Risk by Taxing Banks Properly
At the root of recurring bank crises are deeply-implanted incentives for banks and their executives to take systemically excessive risk. Since the...
Read more
Corporate Short-Termism - In the Boardroom and in the Courtroom
A long-held view in corporate circles has been that furious rapid trading in stock markets has been increasing in recent decades, justifying corporate...
Read more
The European Commission's Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique
In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report...
Read more
Structural Corporate Degradation Due to Too-Big-to-Fail Finance
Corporate governance incentives at too-big-to-fail financial firms deserve systematic examination. For industrial conglomerates that have grown...
Read more
Dodge v. Ford: What Happened and Why?
Behind Henry Ford’s business decisions that led to the widely taught, famous-in-law-school Dodge v. Ford shareholder primacy decision were three...
Read moreExecutive compensation and short-termism
Executive compensation and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Monetary Liability for Breach of the Duty of Care?
This paper clarifies why optimal corporate governance generally excludes monetary liability for breach of directors? and managers? fiduciary duty of...
Read more
Indirect Investor Protection: The Investment Ecosystem and Its Legal Underpinnings
This paper argues that the key mechanisms protecting portfolio investors in public corporate securities are indirect. They do not rely on actions by the...
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
On Inference When Using State Corporate Laws for Identification
A popular research design identifies the effects of corporate governance by (changes in) state laws, clustering standard errors by state of...
Read more
The European Commission's Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique
In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report...
Read more
Cheap-Stock Tunneling Around Preemptive Rights
Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive...
Read more
Corporate Purpose: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations/Confusions
Does it matter if corporate leaders pursue a broader, social corporate purpose rather than a narrow, shareholder-centric one, and can legal and...
Read moreControlling shareholders and short-termism
Controlling shareholders and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
The missing role of controlling shareholders in the short-termism debate
Corporate short-termism, i.e., corporations sacrificing long-term value for short-term profits, has received a lot of attention in the corporate...
Read moreKeynote: An overview of the evidence on corporate short-termism
Keynote: An overview of the evidence on corporate short-termism
Speakers
Conference Documents
Climate Risk Disclosure and Institutional Investors
Employing disclosure theory, we develop hypotheses regarding the preferences of institutional investors with respect to firms’ climate risk...
Read more
The Effects of Mandatory ESG Disclosure around the World
We compile a novel dataset on mandatory environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure around the world to analyze the stock liquidity effects...
Read more
The Importance of Climate Risks for Institutional Investors
According to our survey about climate risk perceptions, institutional investors believe climate risks have financial implications for their...
Read more
Do Investors Care About Biodiversity?
This paper introduces a new measure of a firm's negative impact on biodiversity, the corporate biodiversity footprint, and studies whether it is priced...
Read more
Is History Repeating Itself? The (Un)predictable Past of ESG Ratings
The explosion in ESG research has led to a strong reliance on ESG rating providers. We document widespread changes to the historical ratings of a key...
Read more
Institutional Investors and Corporate Governance
We provide a comprehensive overview of the role of institutional investors in corporate governance with three main components. First, we establish...
Read more
ESG Shareholder Engagement and Downside Risk
We show that engagement on environmental, social, and governance issues can benefit shareholders by reducing firms’ downside risks. We find that the...
Read more
Firm-level Climate Change Exposure
We develop a method that identifies the attention paid by earnings call participants to firms' climate change exposures. The method adapts a machine...
Read moreStewardship, activism and short-termism
Stewardship, activism and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Shareholder Stewardship in the Netherlands: The Role of Institutional Investors in a Stakeholder Oriented Jurisdiction
We study institutional investors’ voice in the Netherlands, focusing on shareholder voting in particular. The Dutch Stewardship Code, developed by...
Read more
Blockchain Technology for Corporate Governance and Shareholder Activism
Blockchain is a technology that can offer smart solutions for classical corporate governance inefficiencies, especially in the relationship between...
Read more
Bringing the AGM to the 21st Century: Blockchain and Smart Contracting Tech for Shareholder Involvement
The AGM is often considered to play an important role in direct shareholder monitoring of directors and corporate blockholders. However, its practical...
Read more
Shareholder Sustainability Activism in the Netherlands
Corporations play a crucial role in achieving a sustainable world. In achieving corporate sustainability, the current regulatory frameworks...
Read more
Blockchain and Smart Contracting for the Shareholder Community
Current shareholder engagement systems face large classical inefficiencies. First, due to the large chains of intermediaries in the current...
Read more
The Viability of Blockchain in Corporate Governance
Blockchain technology, along with distributed ledger technologies (DLT), has gained recognition as a potential game-changer in corporate...
Read moreShareholder pay-outs and short-termism
Shareholder pay-outs and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Powering Preemptive Rights with Presubscription Disclosure
Preemptive rights can prevent cheap-issuance tunneling by a controller when outside investors know that the offered securities are cheap. But...
Read more
Managerial Trustworthiness and Buybacks
CEO trustworthiness is positively related to long-term excess returns after buyback announcements. When the CEO is trustworthy, statements that the...
Read more
The European Commission's Sustainable Corporate Governance Report: A Critique
In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by EY. The Report...
Read more
Short-Termism, Shareholder Payouts, and Investment in the EU
Investor-driven “short-termism” is said to harm EU public firms’ ability to invest for the long term, prompting calls for the EU to better...
Read more
The Effect of Minority Veto Rights on Controller Pay Tunneling
A central challenge in the regulation of controlled firms is curbing rent extraction by controllers. As independent directors and fiduciary duties are...
Read more
IPO Price Formation and Board Gender Diversity
In January 2020, Goldman Sachs announced that it would no longer underwrite the IPOs of firms with all-male boards, stating that gender-diverse board...
Read more
Do Founders Control Start-Up Firms that Go Public?
Black & Gilson (1998) argued that an IPO-welcoming stock market stimulates venture deals by enabling VCs to give founders a valuable “call option...
Read more
Rationalizing the Dodd-Frank Clawback
On July 1, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed an excess-pay clawback rule to implement the provisions of Section 954 of the...
Read moreQuarterly reporting and short-termism
Quarterly reporting and short-termism
Speakers
Discussants
Conference Documents
Compliance Gatekeepers
What determines the effectiveness of corporate compliance programs, and who is accountable when they fail? Scholars and policymakers tend to answer...
Read more
Specialist Directors
What determines the effectiveness of corporate boards? Corporate legal scholars usually approach this question by focusing on directors’...
Read more
The Power of the Narrative in Corporate Lawmaking
The notion of stock-market-driven short-termism relentlessly whittling away at the American economy’s foundations is widely accepted and highly...
Read more
Is Pollution Value-Maximizing? The DuPont Case
Litigation, regulation, and reputation are the key mechanisms to restrain companies from profiting by externalizing larger costs on society. We...
Read moreWrap up