Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in the world's most important financial markets have been falling for the past decade. This has not been a gentle decline, but a collapse that preceded the 2008 financial crisis and shows no sign of abating. Public companies have been an integral part of developed...

The corporate governance challenge for Canada is to improve the quality of its corporate performance, which has been declining relative to its international peers for decades. This is quite different from the usual assumption that corporate governance is primarily a matter of controlling...

Corporate governance is currently understood by most legal actors to lie at the heart of corporate law. In addition to the explosion in academic interest in governance over the past three decades, it has increasingly been seen as a way to address a wide array of economic and social problems. In...

The recent growth in executive compensation plays a significant part in discussions of corporate governance. The dominant narrative uses agency cost theory to explain executive pay in terms of self-dealing executives and directors too weak or conflicted to stop them. The wide-spread acceptance...

The essay reviews two recent book-length treatments of the rise of institutional shareholder power in the corporate governance arrangements of Western corporations, the internal incentives of those shareholders, and the economic consequences.The books reviewed: Corporate Governance and...

It is the best of times for Canada’s public markets, it is the worst of times for Canada’s public markets. It is an age when markets have been rewarding public companies with the highest valuations seen in generations. It is an age of a rapid decline in Canadian companies opting to go...

Chapter one of Start-up and Growth Companies in Canada: a Guide to Legal and Business Practice 2nd ed. (Lexis/Nexis Butterworths, 2013). The chapter describes the life-cycle of growth companies in Canada, as well as empirical research on how they tend to develop over time. It introduces certain...

The current market for proxy advice arises out of an agency problem, but not the one usually assumed. Investment fund managers have relatively few economic incentives to invest effort on corporate governance and so they tend to organize around picking the best stocks and trading those stocks at...

Growth companies contribute disproportionately to Canada’s job creation, economic development and innovation. Most growth companies can match neither the salaries nor the security of more established competitors for executive talent. This makes their only advantage — the growth prospects of...