Shareholder Engagement Inside and Outside the Shareholder Meeting
CLARS Members Dr Tim Bowley, Professor Jennifer Hill and Dr Steve Kourabas explore the engagement practices of public company shareholders and offer several important insights.
Shareholder engagement is on a steep upward trajectory in the ESG era , particularly when it comes to issues of climate change. It will also be a chapter in the forthcoming book, Board-Shareholder Dialogue: Policy Debate, Legal Constraints and Best Practices (edited by Luca Enriques & Giovanni Strampelli, 2024, Cambridge University Press).
CLARS Members are engaged in international research projects on shareholder engagement and activism by institutional investors and millennials. Tim Bowley and Professor Jennifer Hill have written several recent articles and book chapters focused on institutional investor activism. These include an article and book chapter on shareholder rights. In ‘Shareholder Inspection Rights in Australia: Then and Now’, Tim and Jennifer explore the trajectory of Australia’s statutory inspection right, and how it can potentially be used as a precursor to institutional investor activism.
Their recent book chapter, ‘Stewardship and Collective Action: The Australian Experience’, in Global Shareholder Stewardship (edited by Dionysia Katelouzou and Dan W. Puchniak, Cambridge University Press, 2022), Tim and Jennifer examine the potential for institutional investors to leverage their power through coordinated action with other institutions.
In the article, ‘The Global ESG Stewardship Ecosystem’, they analyse the vast transnational ecosystem, in which institutional investors play a central role in placing increasing pressure on corporations to integrate ESG factors into their business models.
CLARS Deputy Director, Dr Steve Kourabas, recently joined Tim and Jennifer for another research project on shareholder engagement, initiated by the University of Oxford, UK, and Bocconi University, Italy. Steve’s involvement in this project brought another important aspect into the shareholder engagement mix – namely, the role of technology and its use by Millennial and Gen-Z investors in this regard. Steve, Tim and Jennifer’s research on ‘Shareholder Engagement Inside and Outside the Shareholder Meeting’ was presented at a major corporate governance conference in Rome in October 2022.
In a recent paper, ‘Shareholder Engagement Inside and Outside the Shareholder Meeting’, CLARS colleagues and co-authors, Dr Tim Bowley, Professor Jennifer Hill, and Dr Steve Kourabas explore today's complex synergies between different engagement techniques, including, but also beyond, the traditional shareholder meeting. The paper appeared last week in posts as part of the Oxford Business Law Blog (OBLB) Board-Shareholder Dialogue Series and on the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog.
Steve’s work builds on his recent research on equity crowdfunding and its implications for corporate governance in Australia. His article, ‘Shareholder (Dis)Empowerment through Crowd-Sourced Equity Funding’, is forthcoming in the UNSW Law Journal in 2023.
This story was featured in the first edition of CLARS Highlights. Download the first edition.
Posted 15 June 2023