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mission et composition du conseil d'administration normes de droit

Une critique malvenue ?

Ivan Tchotourian 8 juin 2016

Dans un de ces derniers billets Yvan Allaire revient sur un article du New York Times qui se montre critique et réservée sur les conséquences de la féminisation des CA : « Le New York Times et la diversité au C.A. ». Nous ne pouvons qu’être d’accord avec l’auteur lorsqu’il exprime des réserves sur l’article d’autant que, comme il le dit très bien, la question est d’équité !

Or, justement, le New York Times faisait état récemment d’une étude menée auprès des 100 plus grandes sociétés américaines par la firme Equilar. Cette société, grande spécialiste de la rémunération des dirigeants, rapporte qu’une présence accrue de femmes aux conseils est associée à une rémunération du PDG qui est de 15% supérieur à ce qui est payé aux PDG d’entreprises dont le conseil est moins divers. (Gretchen Morgenson, « Where more women are on boards, executive pay is higher », NYT, May 27th 2016).

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Ivan Tchotourian

autres publications mission et composition du conseil d'administration normes de droit

Incertitudes sur les conséquences de la féminisation des CA

Ivan Tchotourian 31 mai 2016

ECGI publie un nouveau papier ECGI Finance Series 466/2016 consacré à la féminisation des CA intitulé : « Women on Boards: The Superheroes of Tomorrow? » (par Renée Adams).

Can female directors help save economies and the firms on whose boards they sit?

Policy makers seem to think so. Numerous countries have implemented boardroom gender policies because of business case arguments. While women may be the key to healthy economies, I argue that more research needs to be done to understand the benefits of board diversity. The literature faces three main challenges: data limitations, selection and causal inference. Recognizing and dealing with these challenges is important for developing informed research and policy. Negative stereotypes may be one reason women are underrepresented in management. It is not clear that promoting them on the basis of positive stereotypes does them, or society, a service.

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Ivan Tchotourian

engagement et activisme actionnarial mission et composition du conseil d'administration Normes d'encadrement normes de droit

Vote majoritaire : un moyen de rendre le CA plus responsable ?

Ivan Tchotourian 5 avril 2016

Un peu de lecture pour ce matin ? Je vous renvoie à cet intéressant article : Stephen Choi, New York University Jill Fisch, University of Pennsylvania and ECGI Marcel Kahan, New York University and ECGI Edward Rock, University of Pennsylvania, « Does Majority Voting Improve Board Accountability? », Law Working Paper No. 310/2016, March 2016.

Directors have traditionally been elected by a plurality of the votes cast. This means that in uncontested elections, a candidate who receives even a single vote is elected. Proponents of “shareholder democracy” have advocated a shift to a majority voting rule in which a candidate must receive a majority of the votes cast to be elected. Over the past decade, they have been successful, and the shift to majority voting has been one of the most popular and successful governance reforms. Yet critics are skeptical as to whether majority voting improves board accountability. Tellingly, directors of companies with majority voting rarely fail to receive majority approval – even more rarely than directors of companies with plurality voting. Even when such directors fail to receive majority approval, they are unlikely to be forced to leave the board. This poses a puzzle: why do firms switch to majority voting and what effect does the switch have, if any, on director behavior?

We empirically examine the adoption and impact of a majority voting rule using a sample of uncontested director elections from 2007 to 2013. We test and find partial support for four hypotheses that could explain why directors of majority voting firms so rarely fail to receive majority support: selection; deterrence/accountability; electioneering by firms; and restraint by shareholders.

Our results further suggest that the reasons for and effects of adopting majority voting may differ between early and later adopters. We find that early adopters of majority voting were more shareholder-responsive than other firms even before they adopted majority voting. These firms seem to have adopted majority voting voluntarily, and the adoption of majority voting has made little difference in their responsiveness to shareholders responsiveness going forward. By contrast, for late adopters, we find no evidence that they were more shareholder-responsive than other firms before they adopted majority voting, but strong evidence that they became more responsive after adopting majority voting.

Differences between early and late adopters can have important implications for understanding the spread of corporate governance reforms and evaluating their effects on firms. Reform advocates, rather than targeting the firms that, by their measures, are most in need of reform, instead seem to have targeted the firms that are already most responsive. They may then have used the widespread adoption of majority voting to create pressure on the nonadopting firms.

Empirical studies of the effects of governance changes thus need to be sensitive to the possibility that early adopters and late adopters of reforms differ from each other and that the reforms may have different effects on these two groups of firms.

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Ivan Tchotourian