IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/17276.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The New Corporate Governance

Author

Listed:
  • Zingales, Luigi
  • Hart, Oliver

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been a dramatic increase in shareholder engagement on environmental and social issues. In some cases shareholders are pushing companies to take actions that may reduce market value. It is hard to understand this behavior using the dominant corporate governance paradigm based on shareholder value maximization. We explain how jurisprudence has sustained this criterion in spite of its economic weaknesses. To overcome these weaknesses we propose the criterion of shareholder welfare maximization and argue that it can better explain observed behavior. Finally, we outline how shareholder welfare maximization can be implemented in practice.

Suggested Citation

  • Zingales, Luigi & Hart, Oliver, 2022. "The New Corporate Governance," CEPR Discussion Papers 17276, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17276
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP17276
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Shira Cohen & Igor Kadach & Gaizka Ormazabal & Stefan Reichelstein, 2023. "Executive Compensation Tied to ESG Performance: International Evidence," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(3), pages 805-853, June.
    2. Carlo Drago & Fabio Fortuna, 2023. "Investigating the Corporate Governance and Sustainability Relationship: A Bibliometric Analysis Using Keyword-Ensemble Community Detection," Working Papers 2023.12, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    3. Anjan V. Thakor, 2023. "Finance research: What are the new frontiers?," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 58(3), pages 453-462, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Shareholder value; Shareholder welfare; Proxy voting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
    • L21 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Business Objectives of the Firm
    • K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Business and Securities Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:17276. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.