Corporate governance - Vigil

The world is clamoring for corporations to serve society. With the recognition that adequate externality regulation is unlikely to manifest, scholars, politicians, major shareholders, and other corporate stakeholders have joined in urging companies to practice corporate citizenship. But this advocacy is unlikely to alter corporate decisionmaking to the desired extent. In particular, proponents of stakeholder governance ask fiduciaries to operate against a deeply-ingrained incentive structure that pushes them to maximize shareholder wealth as a first priority.

Public companies face a conundrum navigating two divergent business forces. Directors identify growing business-model disruptions (52%) and a slowing global economy (51%) as the top trends most likely to impact their organization over the next 12 months. While not contradictory, these divergent trends create a challenge for many companies: how to balance a growth and disruption mind-set to stave off competition with preparations for the impact of a potential recession.

The new year provides the chance to look back at where we’ve been. Our post summarizes financial performance in 2019 and how those results are expected to drive annual incentives for 2019. It’s also a time for looking ahead. So we consider how performance results are expected to rebound in 2020.

The era of stakeholder governance and corporations with a purpose beyond profits is taking hold, with corporate directors expected to answer to more constituencies and shoulder a greater burden than ever before. At the same time, investors—both in the US and abroad—continue to expect corporations to deliver superior financial performance over both the short and long term.

When firms are takeover targets, they often experience a rise – or run-up – in the price of their stock even before the takeover is publicly announced. The common wisdom about run-ups is that information about the impending takeover is leaked to the market, which causes the stock price to increase