En conclusion, le rôle des dirigeants financiers dans l'ère de l'IA est plus crucial que jamais pour garantir la profitabilité, la prospérité et surtout la durabilité des entreprises. En conciliant performance financière et responsabilité durable, les dirigeants d'entreprise jouent un rôle essentiel dans la création de valeur à long terme et dans la construction d'un avenir de long terme pour les générations futures. Il est important, et dans la nature humaine, de continuer d'innover en nous adaptant aux nouvelles technologies mais en en veillant à promouvoir des pratiques éthiques pour assurer le succès et la pérennité de nos entreprises. En clair, faire du profit, c'est bien, avec des engagements durables, c'est mieux.

Pour améliorer leur image environnementale, de nombreuses grandes sociétés financières se sont engagées ces dernières années à mettre leur puissance financière au service de la lutte contre les changements climatiques. Des géants de la finance comme JPMorgan, State Street et Pimco viennent de se retirer de Climate Action 100+, une coalition internationale de gestionnaires de fonds qui incitait les grandes entreprises à s’attaquer aux problèmes climatiques. Le lent et régulier recul de Wall Street par rapport à son engagement vert dure depuis des mois, aiguillonné par les virulentes critiques du Parti républicain, qui accusent les sociétés d’investissement de faire du « capitalisme woke ». Ces dernières semaines, tout s’est accéléré : BlackRock, le plus grand gestionnaire d’actifs au monde, a réduit sa participation au groupe. Ce revirement montre la difficulté, pour le monde des affaires, d’investir plus vert, comme promis. De nombreuses entreprises se sont engagées à lutter contre les changements climatiques, mais le diable est dans les détails.

C’est sûr, la rémunération des dirigeants reste un sujet sensible. Toutefois, de plus en plus d’investisseurs exigent que les données ESG soient intégrées dans la politique salariale des entreprises cotées en Bourse. Pour eux, c’est le moyen le plus efficace pour stimuler les performances ESG et responsabiliser les dirigeants. Malheureusement, le lien direct entre la rémunération et les performances non financières n'est pas encore une pratique courante. Dans un monde où le succès n'est plus seulement synonyme de croissance financière, il est de plus en plus important de sensibiliser les dirigeants à leurs responsabilités non financières. D’autant plus, que la prise en compte de facteurs non financiers dans le système de rémunération peut même avoir un effet positif sur la croissance financière.

Ces investisseurs sont la Caisse de dépôt, la Banque Nationale, Bâtirente, l'assureur Beneva, le Mouvement Desjardins, le Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Fondaction CSN, la fondation familiale Trottier, Optimum Grouope financier et le Samara Family Office, qui investit pour le compte d'une centaine de familles fortunées. «Cette initiative a pour objectifs d’identifier et de faire croître les stratégies d’investissement durable les plus novatrices et de propulser les firmes de gestion d’actifs québécoises spécialisées en ESG [questions environnementales, sociales et de gouvernance] et en finance durable», lit-on dans un communiqué publié mardi.

In January 2010, decades of legal precedent were overturned when the Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. FEC, decided that the government cannot restrict independent political expenditures by corporations, labor unions, and other associations. Critics decried the devastating impacts of independent spending by corporations. For example, the editorial board of the New York Times wrote that it “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.

Dimensional’s recent paper The Economics of Corporate Governance provides a concise overview of the corporate governance literature. We focus on the governance of for-profit, publicly traded corporations and address two important questions. First, for whom should such corporations be run, shareholders or stakeholders? Second, what is the impact of governance provisions on shareholder value?  We ground our analysis in the agency view of the corporation, which emphasizes the costs and benefits of delegated power. Under the agency view, a key concern is that directors and executives might use their discretion to advance their own interests at the expense of the constituencies they serve. Corporate governance is thus faced with a fundamental tension between the need to grant directors and executives sufficient discretion to fulfill their duties and the need to establish guardrails to deter possible opportunistic behavior. This tension is central to the two questions we address.

The human rights regulatory landscape is changing rapidly, evolving from soft to hard law and with momentum towards mandatory due diligence. These changes are driven by jurisdictions responding to human rights challenges with the introduction and strengthening of mandatory disclosure legislation and import controls. Companies, and also increasingly investors, are subject to regulation that is expanding in its scope and enforcement and that requires identification, mitigation, remediation, and disclosure of adverse human rights impacts. This post provides a resource for investors to navigate the human rights regulatory landscape, focusing on human rights due diligence, along with single-issue regulation on modern slavery, indigenous rights, and artificial Along with highlighting the strengths and limitations of current regulatory models, the paper includes an overview of key legislation on human rights globally.

Nothing in either corporate or securities law requires companies to notify investors what they will be voting on before the record date for the meeting. In a forthcoming paper, we show that, overwhelmingly, they do not. The result is “hidden agendas”: for 88% of shareholder votes, investors cannot find out what they will be voting on before the record date. This poses an especially serious problem for investors who engage in securities lending: they must decide whether the expected benefit of voting exceeds the expected benefit of continuing to lend their shares (or making them available for lending) without knowing what they will be voting on. All investors who engage in share lending are affected, but the problem is particularly acute for large investment managers that have fiduciary duties related to voting. At present, they must discharge these duties in the dark

In the face of growing cyber threats, boards play a critical role in effective cybersecurity governance. The SEC’s new cybersecurity disclosure regulation puts even greater emphasis on the board’s duty to oversee how management addresses cyber risk and compliance obligations. It’s more important than ever for directors to understand the threat landscape, identify knowledge gaps, nurture a cyber-aware culture and evolve their governance practices. By taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity governance, Amy Rojik says, boards can help management protect the organization and meet compliance needs.

Tandis que les effets des changements climatiques continuent de se faire ressentir à l’échelle mondiale, de plus en plus d’investisseurs exigent que les entreprises fassent preuve de plus de transparence quant aux répercussions environnementales de leurs activités et aux risques qui en découlent. Nombreuses sont les entreprises qui ont déjà adhéré au mouvement de la durabilité, promettant de réduire leurs émissions de carbone et d’investir dans des processus plus verts, menant à une croissance exponentielle du marché de la finance durable ces dernières années. Il n’y a toutefois pas encore de consensus international sur les normes d’évaluation et de présentation de tels engagements. [...] Andrew MacDougall, associé qui dirige le groupe de pratique de la Gouvernance d’entreprise d’Osler, souligne que les organismes de réglementation canadiens doivent au préalable adopter toute ligne directrice mise de l’avant par l’ISSB ou un autre organisme pour qu’elle puisse prendre effet au pays.

The recent, twentieth anniversary of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (“Sarbanes”) offers an important corporate responsibility teaching moment for corporate executives, board members and their accounting and legal advisors. This is especially the case given that so many of them were not in similar positions when the law was enacted on July 30, 2002, and may be unfamiliar with the extraordinary circumstances that led to its enactment. Sarbanes reflected a bipartisan Congressional effort to respond firmly to widespread accounting scandals and notorious incidents of corporate fraud in 2000-2001. These prompted several economy-shaking bankruptcies that undermined public confidence in corporate financial statements. The ripple effects of these incidents impacted principles of corporate governance, and the manner in which legal and accounting firms interact with their clients. The scope of the Congressional response became one of the most consequential corporate governance and finance developments in history, the implications of which are felt in C-Suites and boardrooms to this day.

In this paper and the related book section, I assess what the evidence on stock-market-induced short-termism tells us for policymaking. For this kind of policymaking purposes, we want to know whether the stock market is inducing economy-wide costs, and what the cheapest remedy would be for those costs. In public discourse, stock-market-induced short-termism is thought to be significant economically and socially. Although the non-academic views seem to approach consensus that stock market short-termism is a major problem, there is no consensus in the academic studies on the subject. With the studies so divided, it’s hard to be sure that there’s a serious problem that should be prioritized over other economic problems the country faces.

In the year since my colleague Fabrice Houdart wrote that LGBTQ+ inclusion in the boardroom is simply good governance, the board diversity landscape has heated up, become more complex, and provided glimpses into what the future may hold in this interesting area of corporate governance. Below are a few key themes that I expect will characterize the board diversity landscape. When attention is focused board diversity can increase quickly, but the gains may be narrow. Much of the action on corporate board diversity over the past few years has been catalyzed by legislative action (notably in California, where two laws aimed at board diversity were struck down this spring, but not before leaving their mark) and the national reckoning on racial justice, both serving as wake-up calls for many corporations.