Corporate Governance

Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it’s less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators around the globe than to look at how corporate leaders in the United States have rigged corporate democracy.

In new research, Jitendra Aswani and Roberto Rigobon find that investments raised on sustainable bond markets force firms to make material changes to corporate...

David J. Teece and Aurelien Portuese argue that short-term thinking in American corporate governance, antitrust, and regulation is hampering American innovation and success even as other countries invest in their firms to dominate frontier markets.

In recent research, Jennifer Arlen and Lewis A. Kornhauser develop a new model to understand how countries should approach and balance corporate and individual...

Many asset managers have stopped offering funds supporting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in the face of political backlash. In new research, Omar Vasquez Duque shows that much of this backlash is due to semantics and poor fund design, and that investors across the political spectrum are willing to take lower financial returns to support specific goals under the ESG label.

In 2021, a regulatory shift by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission expanded shareholder proposals on environment and social issues from mere company...

Large asset managers increasingly control voting rights on behalf of investors, raising questions about ideological alignment in corporate governance. Pablo Montagnes, Zac Peskowitz, and...

As financial markets take on societal challenges like climate change, new research from Robin Döttling, Doron Levit, Nadya Malenko and Magdalena Rola-Janicka explores how shareholder democracy interacts with the political process to impact public goods provisions. The authors investigate the potential of investor-driven governance to supplement the shortfalls of the regulatory system, highlighting both benefits and risks posed by wealth inequality and ESG backlash.

Todd A. Gormley, Manish Jha and Meng Wang examine the impact of state-level political dynamics on the support institutional investors provide to socially responsible investing (SRI) proposals. The findings reveal that investors are less likely to support SRI initiatives at firms headquartered in Republican-led states, suggesting that regional political pressures are shaping corporate social responsibility trends.

The following is an excerpt from Sarah C. Haan’s book, “Reclaiming Corporate Democracy.”