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Full-Text Articles in Law
'Public' Mutual Funds, Jeff Schwartz
'Public' Mutual Funds, Jeff Schwartz
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
The concentration of public equity in the hands of just a few mutual-fund complexes has raised concerns about whether these institutions take seriously the stewardship obligations that come with the significant voting power that they have amassed. One leading theory, the agency-cost theory, is that the major fund complexes, all of which specialize in passively managed funds, lack the incentive to adequately police corporate managers on behalf of fund shareholders. Others counter that competition for mutual-fund investors provides sufficient incentive for satisfactory oversight.
I argue that neither agency costs nor competitive incentives are the primary driver of stewardship behavior. Rather, …
Esg And Climate Change Blind Spots: Turning The Corner On Sec Disclosure, Cynthia A. Williams, Donna M. Nagy
Esg And Climate Change Blind Spots: Turning The Corner On Sec Disclosure, Cynthia A. Williams, Donna M. Nagy
Articles by Maurer Faculty
This article examines four areas in which the SEC, for more than a decade, resisted reform or impeded shareholders’ access to sought-after environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information. These areas are: (1) the SEC’s refusal to act on several rulemaking petitions submitted during the years 2009 to 2018, which called for expanded ESG disclosure; (2) the SEC’s grudging promulgation of rules concerning social disclosures as required by Congress in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010; (3) the SEC’s 2020 revisions to SEC Rule 14a-8, which make the submission of shareholder proposals more difficult, thereby thwarting investor efforts to raise ESG concerns; …