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The Economic (In) Significance of Executive Pay ESG Incentives
Get PDFThe hottest topic in corporate governance circles today involves company commitments to and pursuit of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives in addition to the traditional pursuit of profits. One facet of this debate has to do with how to motivate executives to pursue ESG goals. Increasingly, companies tie executive pay to ESG performance, although even strong ESG advocates debate the advisability of doing so. This Article joins the fray by closely examining ESG-based CEO pay arrangements at a subset of companies with leadership positions on the Business Roundtable, an industry trade group that embraced ESG in a 2019 statement of corporate purpose. The primary takeaway of this analysis is that in almost all cases, explicit, non-discretionary ESG incentives are economically insignificant relative to executives’ incentives to maximize share value arising from shares owned outright and unvested or unexercised equity-based compensation. These findings suggest that either ESG-based pay arrangements at these firms are window dressing or that the directors making these compensation decisions do not subscribe to conventional thinking on incentive creation./= / \u3e/= / \u3eTo be sure, at all but one of these companies, explicit, non-discretionary ESG incentives were incorporated only in annual bonus plans. One sample company – Duke Energy – tied CEO equity pay to ESG performance and in so doing created a meaningful link between pay and ESG performance. While this approach could be seen as a roadmap for those seeking meaningful ESG-based pay incentives, this Article concludes by questioning the wisdom of this approach, joining the cautionary camp in the normative debate
William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships Honor Mark Grinstaff, Gary Lawson, and Dana Robert
Get PDF“Through their research, scholarship, and teaching, Professors Robert, Grinstaff, and Lawson represent the very best of Boston University’s faculty—leading in their fields and being model citizens of our University. I am very proud to honor them as Warren Professors,” says Robert A. Brown, University president.
Established in 2008 and named in honor of BU’s first president, the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships are bestowed upon senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and the University’s civic life
Massachusetts Needs More Ex-public Defenders as Judges
Get PDFFour to one.
That is the ratio of former prosecutors to public defenders who sit on the seven-person Supreme Judicial Court, our highest state court.
On our 25-member Appeals Court, which sits one level below the SJC and is the final word in the vast majority of criminal cases, the count is worse: 16 to three. But two of those former public defenders also worked as prosecutors before reaching the bench; and two other appellate judges, while never formal prosecutors, worked in the Attorney General\u27s Office (i.e., in other law enforcement roles).
This staggering imbalance of experience and outlook is unacceptable in the branch of government that is least accountable to the people and most responsible for ensuring individual liberty and fair treatment by law enforcement and the Legislature
End of Roe v. Wade Expected to Have Harshest Effect on More Vulnerable Communities
No full textThe impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to hit vulnerable communities hardest
Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law
Get PDFThe tax law\u27s race-blind approach produces bad tax policy.\u27 This Essay uses three very different examples to show how failing to openly and honestly address race generates bias, and how devastating the results can be.2 Ignoring race does not solve problems; it creates them. ProPublica has shown, for example, that because of the perils of filing income taxes while Black, the five most heavily audited counties in the United States are Black and poor.
The racial bias long tolerated-and sometimes exploited-by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax deductions that others in similar situations enjoyed. 4 In 2000, Liberia was threatened with sanctions for being a tax haven, but Switzerland was not.5 In 2014, Eric Garner died in police custody after being suspected of evading a tax.6 In each instance, anti-Blackness played a role in ways the tax law either ignores or actively leverages. Because a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations-including the Biden administration after a full year in office-has declined to embrace comprehensive data on race, the tax law equivalent of body cameras, we must rely on stories to understand the impacts of filing while Black. The role of tax law in Black lives-and on Black deaths-demands our attention. Yet even today, the most powerful voices in tax policy, for example Treasury Secretaries, 7 continue to disregard the lessons countless Gilliams, Liberias, and Garners have suffered or died to teach us.
Part II highlights the tendency of even the most inquisitive tax minds to disregard the potential impact of race on interactions between taxpayers and tax authorities. A Black artist-long treated unequally by dealers, curators, and critics faced first the pain of being denied a deduction for business expenses readily granted to others, only to then suffer the further indignity of having that denial offered to generations of law students as comedy rather than tragedy. Part III offers a fleeting glimpse of a world in which a Black perspective shapes the course of global tax policymaking, with the Congressional Black Caucus handing a significant setback to efforts by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD ) to punish poor Black countries as tax havens while ignoring the misdeeds of whiter, wealthier states. Finally, Part IV urges tax experts to ask uncomfortable questions about the role tax policy played in the death of Eric Garner while in the custody of NYC police officers, and how that death should change the design and enforcement of tax laws
Where is the “Public” in American Public Health? Moving from individual responsibility to collective action
Get PDFAmerican individualism continues to prove incommensurate to the public health challenge of COVID-19. Where the previous US Administration silenced public health science, neglected rising inequalities, and undermined global solidarity in the early pandemic response, the Biden Administration has sought to take action to respond to the ongoing pandemic. However, the Administration\u27s overwhelming focus on individual responsibility over population-level policy stands in sharp contrast to fundamental tenets of public health that emphasize “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy”. When this misalignment of individual responsibility and public health initially became clear with the removal of mask guidance for vaccinated individuals in May 2021, we decried the CDC Director\u27s public admonition: “Your health is in your hands.” We argued that such statements – coupled with the label of “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” – represent a moral failing of US policy because they “undermine the fundamental notion that all people are equal in dignity and rights” and implicitly shift blame to individuals for systemic failures
Seven steps to increase patent inventorship equity
No full textIt’s no secret that women are underrepresented as patent inventors in the United States. Institutional structures and biases, including patent education gaps, status hierarchy, and monetary incentives, contribute to the gender patent gap. Unfair inventorship attribution decisions create cumulative disadvantages in employment, tenure, and status. TTOs can help do something about it, and later in this article we’ll list seven concrete steps that can be taken in the form of data collection and metrics to quantify the problem, patent education, and altering internal processes for disclosing inventions and obtaining patents
Annulled Arbitration Awards
No full textI. TRAVELOGUE FOR AN ANNULLED AWARD
A. The Effects of Annulment, at Home and Abroad
During discussion of a problematic judicial decision, one friend chided another, “You need to get the facts, or the facts will get you.” The admonition proves vital not only in understanding specific cases, but also in formulating sound legal doctrine to address problems sharing a common core but manifesting themselves through wide variations of context.
One such context-driven policy conundrum lies in deciding when courts should enforce annulled arbitration awards, as illustrated by a currently unfolding saga with a punch line remaining in suspense as this essay goes to press. In April 2016, a Dutch court annulled awards totaling approximately US$50 billion in disputes between the Russian Federation and shareholders of the former Russian oil producer, Yukos Oil Company. The shareholders then brought enforcement actions in the United Kingdom, which has thus far declined to enforce the awards until Dutch courts decide appeals to the annulments
