“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 […]

More than six months after the fact, the sale of Rona to Lowe’s, a U.S. corporation, continues to generate political controversy. Lowe’s’ first attempt to acquire Rona in 2012 turned more or less hostile in nature, sparking a strong reaction from the Quebec government at the time. The government ordered the financial institutions under its […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In Canadian business law, directors have a duty to act in the best interest of the corporation, which includes the duty to assess, fairly and equitably, the impact of the corporation’s actions and decisions on its stakeholders. But which of the stakeholders’ expectations should be taken into account? How should a board arbitrate between the […]

The Executive Chair of the Institute, Dr. Yvan Allaire,  is mentionned in the Wall Street Journal, the MorningstarAdvisor and the Dow Jones Newswires! In an article about the activist hedge funds. “U.S. businesses, feeling heat from activist investors, are slashing long-term spending and returning billions of dollars to shareholders, a fundamental shift in the way […]

” But it’s no joke to Yvan Allaire, Executive Chair at the Institute of Governance, who believes The Economist is running infomercials for activist hedge funds: On a topic requiring sober, balanced coverage, The Economist cuts logical corners, tramples contrary evidence, ignores a vast store of scholarship, and conjures up an empirical “study” to produce […]

With its knack for tackling big subjects in a one-sided manner, The Economist in its February 7th issue imagines a dystopian world where corporate managers and boards of directors are generally incompetent, most investors are lazy; but “activists are a force for good”, “capitalism’s unlikely heroes” and “the saviours of public companies”! Even for a […]

“If you guessed Hedge Funds, take your seat at the head of the class.  And, do the hedge fund and private equity firms deliver on Shareholder Value?  Not quite: “…the most generous conclusion one may reach from these empirical studies has to be that “activist” hedge funds create some short-term wealth for some shareholders as […]

In case you missed it last weekend, Donna Dabney, Executive Director of the Governance Center at The Conference Board posted this November 14th presentation by  Dr. Yvan Allaire presented at the Annual Meeting of The Conference Board Governance Center. His talk was titled Do activist interventions create long term shareholder value? Allaire reviews a lot of studies and […]

A group of economists, among whom the French economist Thomas Piketty, produced a massive amount of data and statistics documenting the level and rise of economic inequality over long periods of time and across several countries. Making use of this information, Piketty wrote a book, which became the darling of the American, even global, left: […]

“Stay different, and don’t ape the corporate governance structures of the private sector. That in outline was the message to co-ops from Professor Yvan Allaire, the executive chair of Canada’s Institute for Governance to delegates at the co-op summit taking place in Quebec this week. Yvan Allaire talked of what he called a “deep governance […]