Shareholder activism on sustainability issues has become increasingly prevalent over the years, with the number of proposals filed doubling from 1999 to 2013. We use recent innovations in accounting standard setting to classify 2,665 shareholder proposals that address environmental and social...

Empirical studies have shown that state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and especially the compensation of topmanagers, are very relevant to the performance and sustainable provision of public services. Whereas there are numerous studies on the compensation of top-management of private sector...

The board of directors is expected to ensure that management has identified and developed processes to mitigate risks facing the organization, including risks arising from data theft and the loss of information. Unfortunately, recent experience suggests that companies are not doing a sufficient...

Management and disclosure of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues have received substantial interest over the last decade. In this paper, we outline a framework of how ESG issues become financially material, affecting corporate profitability and valuation. We argue that...

How precise should accounting measurements be, if management has discretion to strategically withhold? We examine this question by nesting an optimal persuasion mechanism, which controls what measurements are conducted, within a voluntary disclosure framework a la Dye (85) and Jung and Kwon...

This paper studies the effects of hedge disclosure requirements on corporate risk management and product market competition. The analysis is based on a simple model of market entry and shows that incumbent firms engage in risk management when these activities remain unobserved by outsiders. The...

In this paper, I examine the relation between Integrated Reporting (IR) and the composition of a firm's investor base. I hypothesize and find that firms that practice IR have a more long-term oriented investor base with more dedicated and fewer transient investors. This result is more pronounced...

In this paper, we present the two primary functions of corporate reporting (information and transformation) and why currently isolated financial and sustainability reporting are not likely to perform effectively those functions. We describe the concept of integrated reporting and why integrated...

A long-standing ideology in business education has been that a corporation is run for the sole interest of its shareholders. I present an alternative view where increasing concentration of economic activity and power in the world's largest corporations, the Global 1000, has opened the way for...