In new research, Michele Fioretti, Victor Saint-Jean, and Simon Smith show that shareholders with potential reputational gains will push for corporate actions in the face of shocks like Covid-19 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine that reduce returns to other shareholders who have no reputational gains at stake.

ProMarket Managing Editor Andy Shi reviews the controversy behind ExxonMobil’s new voting program and how it falls into the broader debates over recent developments to shareholder democracy and corporate governance.

Former Federal Trade Commissioner and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra writes that as the federal government circumvents the rule of law by pardoning corporate infractions and crimes in exchange for political favors, individual states, citizens, and businesses will need to pursue private actions against corporate wrongdoing.

Luke Herrine evaluates the Federal Trade Commission’s transformation into a political tool to advance a conservative social agenda. He argues that no FTC initiative better exemplifies the agency’s politicization than its investigation into gender-affirming care that threatens transgender rights and autonomy.

The following is an excerpt from Michael Posner’s recent book, Conscience Incorporated: Pursue Profits While Protecting Human Rights, reprinted here with permission from NYU Press.

Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it’s less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators around the globe than to look at how corporate leaders in the United States have rigged corporate democracy.

William Lazonick writes that recent United States industrial policy initiatives miss the centrality of corporate resource allocation for creating a robust economy, characterized by...

A new paper by Cortelyou C. Kenney explores new developments in game theory to question some of the fundamental assumptions of classical law and economics scholarship, especially the scholarship of John Nash. She suggests that a more sophisticated understanding of cooperation can create fairer and more just institutions that maximize social welfare instead of individual efficiency. 

Roslyn Layton writes that proxy advisors, which provide voting services for shareholder meetings, can influence how publicly traded firms conduct their business. Two proxy firms–Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS)–have 97 percent of the market and have allowed some minority shareholders to exercise outsized influence.

Colleen Honigsberg and Robert J. Jackson, Jr. write that Exxon Mobil’s decision to sue its own investors over a shareholder proposal threatens to enervate an admittedly imperfect but ultimately valuable mechanism that provides shareholder feedback to corporate managers and helps both parties negotiate better governance outcomes.