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Director Accountability And The Mediating Role Of The Corporate Board, Margaret M. Blair
Director Accountability And The Mediating Role Of The Corporate Board, Margaret M. Blair
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
One of the most pressing questions facing both corporate scholars and business people today is how corporate directors can be made accountable. Before addressing this issue, however, it seems important to consider two antecedent questions: To whom should directors be accountable? And for what? Contemporary corporate scholarship often starts from a "shareholder primacy" perspective that holds that directors of public corporations ought to be accountable only to the shareholders, and ought to be accountable only for maximizing the value of the shareholders' shares. This perspective rests on the conventional contractarian assumption that the shareholders are the sole residual claimants and …
Litigating Challenges To Executive Pay: An Exercise In Futility?, Randall Thomas, Kenneth J. Martin
Litigating Challenges To Executive Pay: An Exercise In Futility?, Randall Thomas, Kenneth J. Martin
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This paper is an empirical analysis of plaintiffs' success rates in executive compensation litigation. Using data from publicly available files, this study examines a sample of 124 cases where shareholders have challenged executive compensation levels and practices at public and closely held corporations. This data set shows that shareholders are successful in at least some stage of this litigation in a significant percentage of these cases. Our most robust result is that plaintiffs win a greater percentage of the time in compensation cases against closely held companies than against publicly held companies. This result is consistent for every stage of …
Should Shareholders Have A Greater Say Over Executive Pay??, Randall S. Thomas, Brian R. Cheffins
Should Shareholders Have A Greater Say Over Executive Pay??, Randall S. Thomas, Brian R. Cheffins
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Executive pay arrangements in Britain's publicly quoted companies have been subjected to much criticism in recent years. Proposals that shareholders should have a greater direct say over managerial remuneration have been a by-product of the concerns expressed. Debate on this point, however, has been largely speculative. This is because there is little evidence available in the United Kingdom indicating how shareholders would exercise any new powers they might be given. This paper addresses the evidentiary gap by drawing upon the experience in the United States, where empirical work indicates that shareholder voting only operates as a potential check when pay …