Banks are often accused of making money off complex products that consumers don’t understand. In my book, I discuss how 2 million UK households were sold payment protection insurance policies that they’d never be able to claim on (e.g. due to being self-employed), but customers never understood this. Perhaps the most important product that a …
Do Banks Offer Complex Mortgages to Mislead Customers? Read More »
A hot topic is whether companies should have workers on their boards, to ensure they act in the interest of stakeholders, not just shareholders. This debate was ongoing even before COVID-19 – for example, Theresa May initially suggested that she’d mandate worker representation when she became UK Prime Minister, but then decided against it. It’s …
Do Workers on Boards Protect Jobs in a Downturn? Read More »
On 6 April, I did a Twitter discussion on my book, hosted by Blackwell’s Bookshop. They asked me to start by providing 25-30 Tweets summarising the book, before opening it up to questions. I reproduce them below to provide the ideas of the book in a nutshell. Thanks very much for joining this discussion! I …
(This article was initially featured on the blog for my book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”) Investors are increasingly scrutinizing the ESG performance of companies. This is a positive development – if CEOs know that investors evaluate them on ESG factors, not just short-term earnings, they’ll prioritise these factors …
The Inconsistency of ESG Ratings: Implications for Investors Read More »
Imagine you’re the Minister for Education, deciding how large to make a school district. Smaller school districts offer parents more school choice. For example, in Boston, there are 70 school districts within a 30-minute commute of the downtown area, so parents with a job in downton Boston have 70 districts they can live in and …
Today the House of Commons Select Committee on Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published its report on corporate governance, after extensive consultation of oral and written testimony from a wide range of stakeholders. I applaud the Select Committee for such an extensive, thorough job with an issue of national importance, and am personally grateful …
Executive compensation needs to be reformed. But, most of the calls for reform focus on the wrong dimensions. They focus on the level of pay, or the ratio of executive pay to median worker pay – even though the evidence suggests that low ratios are linked to lower future performance. As I have argued in the Wall Street Journal …
Long-Term Executive Incentives Improve Innovation and Corporate Responsibility Read More »
Does corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) improve firm value? When companies make decisions, should they care only about shareholders or should they take other stakeholders (e.g. employees, customers, the environment) into account? This is a decades-old debate, but despite many cogent views on both sides, there’s surprisingly little hard evidence. In 1970, Milton Friedman famously wrote …
Does corporate social responsibility improve firm value? Read More »