As the New Year rolls along, so does commentary on executive compensation. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, by 11:47 am on the first working day of 2017 (January 3rd) Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs on the TSX index had earned the equivalent of the average annual Canadian wage. Shareholder votes on the […]

[ … ] a growing body of academic research has confirmed that short-term financial activists are a major contributor to systemic short-termism in managing businesses and investments. The notion that activist attacks increase, rather than undermine, long-term value creation has been resoundingly discredited. Economists Yvan Allaire and François Dauphin, for example, demonstrated in a series […]

“WILMINGTON, Del.—Ron Ozer was thrilled to get a job with DuPont, the two-centuries-old chemical company, when he finished his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1990. It was the place to go for young, ambitious chemists; it offered salary and benefits so generous that some people called it “Uncle Dupey.” For 26 years, he invented things for […]

IGOPP’s Executive Chair, Dr. Yvan Allaire’s study on Hedge funds Activism Hedge Fund Activism: Preliminary Results and Some New Empirical Evidence, is quoted in a recent article entitled “Can America’s Companies Survive America’s Most Aggressive Investors?” published in the Atlantic Magazine. This article discusses activist investors who are increasingly gaining control of legacy corporations, forcing them to trim payrolls […]

One such fee is the landing and parking fee charged to airlines – a fee often passed down to consumers. And flights landing in Canada pay some of the highest fees in the world, according to a 2014 report from the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations entitled The Governance of Canadian Airports. […]

More than six months after the fact, the sale of Rona to Lowe’s, a U.S. corporation, continues to generate political controversy. This raises the question: how many large Quebec corporations are vulnerable to a foreign takeover with the consequent loss, sooner or later, of the strategic functions associated with their head offices. Such a takeover […]

The Institute for Governance (IGOPP) is pleased to announe the appointment of Ms. Isabelle Courville as a new board member. Ms. Courville, an engineer and a lawyer by training, is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Laurentian Bank of Canada. Previously, Ms. Courville was President of Hydro‐Québec Distribution. This division has 7,000 employees serving […]

From Japan Today comes an interesting column by Yvan Allaire and Francois Dauphin: Now foreign investors, holding over 30% of their shares, are unrelenting in their pressure for Japanese companies to adopt American-style governance. New governance codes have been written and Japanese stock exchanges are pushing for their implementation. Foreign money managers and institutional investors […]

MONTREAL — News coverage of Rona Inc. in recent years has described the Quebec-based hardware chain as “embattled,” “under-performing,” “struggling” and “slumping.” […] Yvan Allaire, president of the Montreal-based Institute for Governance, considers himself a nationalist when it comes to protecting key industries. For example he opposed Rio Tinto’s 2007 takeover of Alcan, which saw […]

The message of the Dow/DuPont merger and split up is simple: No firm is today “too big to target.” Activists can see the transaction as evidence that, even in the rare case where they lose a proxy fight (as they did at DuPont last year in a squeaker), the handwriting is still on the wall, […]

“Yvan Allaire and François Dauphin cogently analyze the costs and risks of proxy access, arguing that “Anyone believing that this process is likely to produce stronger boards in the long run needs to consider anew the calculus of current and prospective board members, the actions, likely dysfunctional, of people facing the humiliation (and economic loss) […]

In an October 2015 post, I posed the question: Will a New Paradigm for Corporate Governance Bring Peace to the Thirty Years’ War? As we approach the end of 2015, I thought it would be useful to note some of the most cogent recent developments on which the need, and hope, for a new paradigm […]

The board of the Institute for Governance (IGOPP) unanimously approved a Policy paper on Proxy Access by Shareholders to the Director Nomination Process. The prerogative to nominate the members of the board, which has historically been the sole responsibility of boards of directors, has now been challenged by institutional funds determined to acquire the right, […]

Yvan Allaire and François Dauphin return to a topic on which they have been active and important commentators and analysts; namely, hedge fund activism. Specifically, they report on a new study they conducted: ”We … explored, among other things, the consequences of activism over time when compared to a random sample of firms with similar […]

With Hillary Clinton’s tax proposals to encourage longer-term investing, the debate over whether American business is too fixated on the short term has moved from the dimly lit offices of earnest policy wonks into the klieg lights of U.S. primary season. Lots of commentators have jumped into the fray to declare that there is — […]

Activist hedge funds can count on a number of supporters in academia and in the media rising up in defense of their actions. No doubt activist hedge funds have found their most persistent academic supporters in Professor Lucian Bebchuk of the Harvard Law School and his co-authors. In several papers, but most particularly in the […]