Conference Agenda

By bisecting the US directors’ foreign board experience between English-origin “common law” versus continental “code law” countries in 31,777 firm-year observations from 4,053 US-listed firms between 2003-2015, we document that foreign board experience in code law countries is negatively associated with corporate internationalization levels but not experience in common law countries. Several types of robustness tests validate these results. We also examined the board mechanisms (i.e., executive directors versus non-executive directors) that drive these results and the consequences of reduced internationalization levels for the firm’s operational risk-taking and management policies, such as cash holdings, investments, and payout policies.

This paper investigates whether a recent provision of the UK Corporate Governance
Code, forcing management to communicate with shareholders after bad voting results,
creates value. I use a Regression Discontinuity Design on shareholder vote outcomes to
analyze the stock price reaction to a significant shareholder dissent on the meeting day.
Using voting data collected for UK listed firms, I show that companies for which the
minimum approval rate among all ballot items falls slightly below the 80% threshold
realize roughly 2.7% more positive abnormal returns on the meeting day than those
for which the minimum approval rate falls marginally above this threshold.

This paper investigates sensitivities of CEO pay to ESG performance for Chief Executive Officers of S&P 1500 companies from 2006 through 2020. We find that pay-for-ESG-performance elasticities are small and not economically significance. Second, the pay-for-ESG-performance elasticity is stronger for CEOs with conditional (predicted) compensation lower than the sample average. Third, the pay-for-ESG-performance elasticity for companies in industry with significant environmental footprint is also small and of no economic significance. Last, the pay-for-ESG-performance relation has declined following the passage of the say on pay law. Overall, our results are more consistent with the public relation view of ESG pay.