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 […]

The performance of controlled companies has been a contentious issue. For different reasons, various parties have worked hard at convincing the investor class that capital structures other than one-share, one-vote would produce inferior results for shareholders. Consequently, most investment funds frown upon such structures, at best tolerate them, and, at worst, have adopted policies of non-investment in these companies. […]

Not so long ago in an age when they were eating the lunch of American corporations, the Toyotas, Hitachis, Sonys, Canon, Hondas were governed in the worst possible way, at least according to the canons of American governance. Their boards were made up almost exclusively of corporate insiders, with no independent directors, no diversity, no […]

Did the quest, one might dare say the obsession, with implementing “good” governance in public corporations result in better stock market performances for those companies that have adopted the best governance practices? Numerous studies, mostly American, have tried to show a convincing relationship between governance and performance, usually with disappointing results. Indeed, it is not […]

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 […]

There is a frenzied rush for shareholders to get a new ‘right”, the right to put up their own nominees for board membership. Boards of directors, so goes a dominant opinion, are not to be fully trusted to pick the right kind of people as directors or to shift the membership swiftly as circumstances change. […]

This article aims to describe the contemporary objectives and tactics of activist hedge funds as well as the actions taken by the targeted companies as a result of their intervention. In this research, we explore the consequences of activism over time (impact on operational performance and share price returns) and compare these with a random sample of firms […]

This article aims to describe the contemporary objectives and tactics of activist hedge funds as well as the actions taken by the targeted companies as a result of their intervention. In this research, we explore the consequences of activism over time (impact on operational performance and share price returns) and compare these with a random sample of […]

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 […]

Over the last few years, hedge fund activism has received a great deal of coverage in financial media (and in the mainstream press), has triggered heated debates and been the focus of much academic research. Saviour of capitalism for some, for others, activist hedge funds are but mongers of short-term tactics which eventually damage business […]

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 […]

The decades-long conflict that is currently raging over short-termism and activist hedge funds strikes me as analogous to the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th Century, albeit fought with statistics (“empirical evidence”), op-eds and journal articles rather than cannon, pike and sword. I decided, after some thirty-six years in the front line of the army […]