Perhaps this post would have been timelier before the spring submission cycle, but hopefully it will be helpful in framing title options for pieces being developed this summer.  One of the many benefits of co-authorship is learning substantive and procedural knowledge from your collaborators.  On a recent article, I worked with three economists who have different skill sets, perspectives, and discipline standards.  When we were trying to finalize our title, we came up with several different categories or types of article titles—a framework that I will utilize again in the future and which I am sharing with you today.  We selected the “themed” based title for our article, Institutional Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme, and a play on words, Institutional Investors’ Appetite for Alternatives, for a shorter piece appearing on Columbia Blue Sky Blog.

 Title Framework:

SOBER: Institutional Investing after Constituency Statutes

QUESTION:  Does Changing Shareholder Value Maximization Standards Change Institutional Investors’ Behavior?

CONTRAST:  Institutional Investors Behavior Before and After Constituency Statutes

PLAY ON WORDS:  Appetite for Alternatives:  Institutional Investors’ Behavior in the Fact of Shareholder Value Maximization Pressures

FORWARD THINKING:  What Does Institutional Investors Behavior after Constituency Statutes Tell Us Regarding Benefit Corporations?

HISTORICAL:  The Changing Landscape of Directorial Duties: Constituency States to Alternative Purpose Firms

SLATE/OP-ED:  Who’s Afraid of Alternative Purpose Firms?

THEME:  Agency Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme

For those interested and perhaps to put the title options in perspective, here is a little background on our article, Institutional Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme.  In an earlier BLPB post, I linked to our short piece appearing in Columbia Blue Sky Blog.  Our article examines institutional investors’ response to corporate director duty changes embodied in constituency statutes and links our findings to current questions of institutional investors’ potential acceptance of alternative business entities. Our paper surveys the 30+ year literature debate on directors’ duties to maximize shareholder value, a case law analysis of constituency statute litigation, and an empirical study (utilizing a difference-in-differences approach) of institutional investors’ divestment of stock held in companies incorporated in constituency statute jurisdictions.  We first verified that courts enforced constituency statutes, or in other words, that constituency statutes represented at least a small change to directors’ legal duties. In our empirical section, we found no statistically significant departure of institutional investors after the passage of constituency statutes, focusing specifically on institutions with high fiduciary duties. If institutional investors had fled constituency statute investments, which are subject to lower director duties changes than with say benefit corporations, then there would be grounds to think that institutional investors would not invest in alternative purpose firms.  Finding no such negative reaction to constituency statutes does not conclusively indicate institutional investor’s acceptance of alternative purposes firms, especially given the greater deviation from shareholder value maximization by requiring (rather than permitting) directors to consider nonshareholder interests codified in benefit corporation statutes.  It does suggest, however, some latitude for institutional investors to consider alternative purpose firm investments without running afoul of fiduciary duties.  If I were explaining the results to a student, I would say that our study could have produced strong evidence shutting the door on this possibility, but instead the findings leave the door open. This paper is valuable in the absence of direct information on the question, and will certainly give way to findings utilizing empirical data directly on point with publicly-traded benefit corporations and/or B Corporations.

-Anne Tucker