Corporate governance - Vigil

For at least the past decade, U.S. companies have been keenly focused on reducing their expenditures on outside counsel. Many have taken innovative and drastic actions to that end, such as negotiating alternative fee arrangements or making law firms compete for legal work in electronic auctions. Indeed, the conventional view remains that corporate clients are overpaying for legal services. But is that actually the case? One option for reducing legal expenditures is simply to engage a less expensive law firm. Yet surprisingly, there has been little research on whether corporate clients’ choice of law firms is value-maximizing.

The SEC announces the agenda for the Aug. 2, 2016 meeting of the Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee.

On July 13, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a proposal aimed at eliminating or updating duplicative, overlapping and obsolete disclosure requirements. The proposal is welcome, but largely technical in nature and generally focused on duplicative requirements.

Three key groups of urban consumers with numbers and purchasing power are the ones to shape the consumer landscape over the next 15 years, write Richard Dobbs, Jaana Remes and Jonathan Woetzel in Harvard Business Review.

Corporate directors who suspect malfeasance by managers may face conflicting incentives. On the one hand, encouraging transparency and demonstrating diligence by pressing for the investigation and disclosure of problems might be rewarded with re-election, appointment to seats on other boards, and greater shareholder support. On the other hand, revealing misconduct could draw negative attention to the company and result in worse career outcomes for directors. In Do Independent Directors Face Incentives to Monitor Executives? we empirically examine whether directors who publicly demonstrate diligent monitoring are rewarded. Our findings cast doubt on whether directors face strong incentives to monitor. Instead, our results suggest that directors sometimes benefit from looking the other way when they suspect problems.

Investec Plc’s shareholders should vote against the company’s compensation policy next week because pay doesn’t match performance, according to Pensions & Investment Research Consultants Ltd.

Ray Dalio, the chairman of Bridgewater Associates, said the article, which reported on the culture at the hedge fund, contained “significant mischaracterizations.”

Should governments be relying on corporate and securities law to promote humanitarian goals?  This is the question that naturally arises when viewing the SEC’s Conflict Minerals Payment Rule, which requires corporations to disclose their conflict mineral usage as a means of curtailing th

The new “Commonsense Principles of Corporate Governance” (“the Principles”) are a welcome and thoughtful contribution to corporate governance discourse.

The Federal Reserve upgraded its assessment of the economy’s recent performance and said near-term risks to the outlook have diminished, effectively leaving the door open to raise rates later this year, possibly as early as September. Nine of 10 members of the Fed’s policy-making committee voted to leave the benchmark federal-funds rate unchanged at between 0.25% and 0.5%, but they offered a more upbeat description of the labor market and other sectors of the economy.