Does director tenure affect company value?
by Cydney Posner With a number of institutional investors and proxy advisory firms advocating that public companies adopt “board refreshment” policies, much energy has been devoted to studying the impact of director tenure in the context of corporate governance. In “Do Directors Have a Use-By Date? Examining the Impact of […]
SEC permits use of Inline XBRL — will it be enough to make XBRL great?
by Cydney Posner Until now, companies have been required to provide the financial statements accompanying their periodic and current reports in “structured,” i.e., machine-readable, format using XBRL and to provide this XBRL data as an exhibit to their filings. Today, the SEC issued an order allowing companies, on a voluntary […]
Could disclosure avert a decline in investment in human capital?
by Cydney Posner Much attention has been paid to the decline in spending on R&D and capital investments attributed to short-termist myopia. Hedge fund activists have been impugned for pressuring companies to return capital to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends at the expense of funding R&D and […]
Board gender diversity? Hedge fund activists fail miserably but women-led businesses fare better
by Cydney Posner As reported earlier this year on Bloomberg, when activists seek to replace directors at target companies, they rarely look to women. Bloomberg analyzed data regarding five of the biggest U.S. activist hedge funds, each managing at least $18 billion in assets. The data showed that, since the […]
Will the virtual-only shareholders’ annual meeting, once disparaged, be rejuvenated?
by Cydney Posner For many years, annual meetings of shareholders have been viewed as increasingly moribund rituals of corporate governance, as fewer and fewer shareholders are able or willing to overcome the logistical and financial burdens of attendance in person. As a result, in many cases, meetings have evolved into […]
No, please, not another summary!
by Cydney Posner The SEC has adopted an interim final rule implementing a provision of the FAST Act that will expressly allow a company, at its option, to include a summary in its Form 10–K, provided that each item in the summary includes a hyperlink cross-reference to the related material […]
Investors challenge fund managers on say-on-pay vote practices
by Cydney Posner Support for management on say-on-pay votes for the 2016 season so far (data as of May 18) continues at about the same level as in prior years – a median approval rate of 95% among the S&P 500, according to Compensation Advisory Partners, with only three companies […]
Do women directors promote higher CEO pay?
by Cydney Posner As reported on Sunday in this NYT column by Gretchen Morgenson, recent data shows that boards with more gender diversity pay higher compensation to their CEOs. An Equilar analysis of CEO pay at 100 large companies “found that companies with greater gender diversity on their boards paid their chief executives […]
Increasing prevalence of non-GAAP measures in proxy statements
by Cydney Posner According to the WSJ, 2016 saw the biggest gap since 2009 between non-GAAP pro forma results and GAAP results. But non-GAAP measures are not just proliferating in earnings releases, they are also proliferating in proxy statements. The WSJ article reports that, according to Audit Analytics, the term […]
SEC posts Regulatory Flexibility Agenda for 2017
by Cydney Posner As noted in Broc’s blog on thecorporatecounsel.net, the SEC has posted its Regulatory Flexibility Agenda for 2017. And, as Broc observes, these agendas are, to borrow his characterization, purely “aspirational,” and do not commit the SEC to take any of the actions identified or preclude its taking […]
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