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Professor Dionysia Katelouzou of Kings College, London has written an interesting empirical article on hedge fund activisim. The abstract is below:

In recent years, activist hedge funds have spread from the United States to other countries in Europe and Asia, but not as a duplicate of the American practice. Rather, there is a considerable diversity in the incidence and the nature of activist hedge fund campaigns around the world. What remains unclear, however, is what dictates how commonplace and multifaceted hedge fund activism will be in a particular country.

The Article addresses this issue by pioneering a new approach to understanding the underpinnings and the role of hedge fund activism, in which an activist hedge fund first selects a target company that presents high-value opportunities for engagement (entry stage), accumulates a nontrivial stake (trading stage), then determines and employs its activist strategy (disciplining stage), and finally exits (exit stage). The Article then identifies legal parameters for each activist stage and empirically examines why the incidence, objectives and strategies of activist hedge fund campaigns differ across countries. The analysis is based on 432 activist hedge fund campaigns during the period of 2000-2010 across 25 countries.

The findings suggest that the extent to which…

I am passing on the English translation of a call for book chapters issued by a friend and colleague in Dijon, France.  The book is international and has a broad business management focus.

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As the editor of a forthcoming book, it is my greatest pleasure to invite you to submit articles as chapters. The tentative title is: Strategic Managerial Approaches to Crowdfunding Online. The book will be published by IGI Global publishers in the USA, within the series “Advances in Business Strategy and Competitive Advantage (ABSCA).”

Please read carefully the following guidelines for submission:

The context

The emerging crowdfunding phenomenon is a collective effort by individuals who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet and without any specific conventional financial intermediation, in order to invest in and support for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures initiative undertaken by other people or organizations. The spontaneous interactions and transactions between individuals allow relatively considerable fund raisings by drawing on small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the Internet, without standard financial intermediaries.

The advent of crowdfunding coincides with the democratization of information technologies that enable people to contact, interact, collaborate and exchange at lowest costs, if not for free. In fact, information technologies have allowed the drastic reduction of transaction costs and by the same the revival of ancient forms of transactions such as auctions, barter, tenders, recycling, and direct transactions between individuals.

Many platforms encourage crowdfunding such as Kiva, Babyloan, MyC4 in lending to the poor entrepreneurs, Prosper, Kapipal and Zopa in P2P social lending, Kickstarter, MyMajorCompany in entrepreneurial projects, SellaBand in music, etc.

Call for Papers

ITEM 6 – Tunis, Tunisia

Microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding

The Banque Populaire Chair in Microfinance of the Burgundy School of Business (France) and l’École supérieure du commerce de Tunis jointly organize the 6th edition of the annual conference “Institutional and Technological Environment of Microfinance” (ITEM) in March 2015 (17, 18, 19) in Tunis, Tunisia.

The 6th edition brings together–but not limited to-three major issues, which are shaping the sector of microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding.

Coaching in microfinance provides training in business and soft skills (attributes enhancing an individual’s interactions and self-performance) that the poor micro-entrepreneurs rarely have. Increasingly, microfinance academics and practitioners consider building the human capital of micro-entrepreneurs a critical ingredient of moving out of poverty.

Counting and tracking the microfinance clients and prospects with the information technologies not only lessen information asymmetry, but also lower the transaction cost of financial intermediation. Corollary: information technologies can open ways for offering financial services to the poor as a normal way of doing and extending normal business, and accelerate their social integration. 

Crowding, based on the Web 2.0 technologies, enables direct interactions between millions of lending and borrowing people. Through crowdfunding, micro and…

Teaching the definition of a “security” to business associations students who: 1) want to be litigators; 2) are afraid of math, finance, and accounting; 3) don’t know anything about business; 4) only take the class because it’s required; and 5) aren’t allowed to distract themselves with electronics in class is no small feat.

Thankfully, as we were discussing the definition and exemptions, we also touched on IPOs. Many of the students knew nothing about IPOs but were already Alibaba customers and going through some of the registration statement made them understand the many reasons companies want to avoid going public. Of course, now that we went through some of the risk factors, my students who seemed gung ho about the IPO after watching some videos about the hype were a little less excited about it (good thing because they probably couldn’t buy anyway).  

Now if I can only figure out how to jazz up the corporate finance chapter next week.

As I predicted in 2011 here and here, in 2012 here, in 2013 in amicus brief, and countless times on this blog, the SEC Dodd-Frank conflicts minerals law has had significant unintended consequences on the Congolese people and has been difficult to comply with. Apparently the Commerce Department, which has a role to play in determining which mines are controlled by rebels so that US issuers can stay away from them, can’t actually figure it out either. In the past few days, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and other experts including seventy individuals and NGOS (some Congolese) who signed a memo, have called this misguided law into question.  In my view, without the “name and shame” aspect of the law, it is basically an extremely expensive, onerous due diligence requirement that only a few large companies can or have the incentive to do well or thoroughly. More important, and I as I expected, it has had little impact on the violence on the ground and has hurt the people it purported to help.

I had hoped to be wrong. The foundation that I work with helps medical practitioners, midwives, and traditional birth attendants in…

Behemoth proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services has released its 2015 Policy Survey.  I have listed some of the questions below:

Which of the following statements best reflects your organization’s view about the relationship between goal­setting and award values?

 Is there a threshold at which you consider that the magnitude of a CEO’scompensation should warrant concern even if the company’s absolute and relative performance have been positive, for example, outperforming the peer group?

With respect to evaluating the say­ on ­pay advisory vote, how does your organization view disclosed positive changes to the pay program that will be implemented in the succeeding year(s) when a company demonstrates pay­ for ­performance misalignment or other concerns based on the year in review?

If you chose either the first or second answer in the question above, should shareholders expect disclosure of specific details of such future positive changes (e.g., metrics, performance goals, award values, effective dates) in order for the changes to be considered as a potential mitigator for pay ­for ­performance or other concerns for the year in review?

Where a board adopts without shareholder approval a material bylaw amendment that diminishes shareholders’ rights, what approach should be used when evaluating board…

Kinder Morgan, a leading U.S. energy company, has proposed consolidating its Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) under its parent company. If it happens, it would be the second largest energy merger in history (the Exxon and Mobil merger in 1998, estimated to be $110.1 billion in 2014 dollars, is still the top dog). 

Motley Fool details the deal this way:

Terms of the deal
The $71 billion deal is composed of $40 billion in Kinder Morgan Inc shares, $4 billion in cash, $27 billion in assumed debt. 

Existing shareholders of Kinder Morgan’s MLPs will receive the following premiums for their units (based on friday’s closing price):

  • Kinder Morgan Energy Partners: 12%
  • Kinder Morgan Management: 16.5%
  • El Paso Pipeline Partners: 15.4%
Existing unit holders of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners and El Paso Pipeline Partners are allowed to choose to receive payment in both cash and Kinder Morgan Inc shares or all cash. 
As I understand it, the exiting holders of the partnerships would have to pay taxes on the merger (this is partnership to a C-corp), but please, consult your tax professional.  
 
The goal here is said to be to increase dividend potential and use the C-corp structure to

…

On June 5, 2014, SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher commemorated the agency’s 80th anniversary by, among other things, repeating the criticisms of the various nonfinancial disclosures that companies are compelled to make by law or asked to make through shareholder proposals. In his view, “companies’ disclosure documents are being cluttered with non-material information that can drown out or obscure the information that is at the core of a reasonable investor’s investment decision.  The Commission is not spending nearly enough time making sure that our rules elicit focused, meaningful disclosures of material information.” I assume that he is referring to the various environmental, social and governance proposals (“ESG”) brought by socially responsible investors and others. I’m writing this blog post while taking a break from reviewing dozens of these proposals for an article that I am writing on how consumers and investors evaluate ESG disclosures and those required in other countries in the human rights context.

Citing Chair White’s quote about “information overload,” last week the US Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness released a list of relatively non-controversial recommendations on how the SEC can modernize the current disclosure regime so that it can better serve the investing public.

The new crowdfunding exemption in section 4(a)(6) of the Securities Act will, once the SEC adopts the rules required to implement it, allow ordinary investors to invest in unregistered securities offerings. Will those unsophisticated investors go down in flames or will they be able to make rational investment choices?

Some proponents of crowdfunding argue that crowdfunding benefits from the so-called “wisdom of the crowd“: that the collective, consensus choice that results from crowdfunding is better than what any individual could do alone, and often as good as expert choices. A recent study seems to support that view.

Two business professors—Ethan R. Mollick at the Wharton School and Ramana Nanda at Harvard—looked at crowdfunding campaigns for theater projects. They submitted those projects to people with expertise in evaluating theater funding applications and compared the expert evaluations to the actual crowdfunding results.

Mollick and Nanda found a strong positive correlation between the projects funded by the crowd and those rated highly by the experts. In other words, crowds were more likely to fund the campaigns the experts preferred. In addition, projects funded by the crowd that were not rated highly by the experts did just as well as the…

As many have celebrated or decried, Dodd-Frank turned four-years old this week. This is the law that Professor Stephen Bainbridge labeled “quack federal corporate governance round II” (round I was Sarbanes-Oxley, as labeled by Professor Roberta Romano). Some, like Professor Bainbridge, think the law has gone too far and has not only failed to meet its objectives but has actually caused more harm than good (see here, for example).  Some think that the law has not gone far enough, or that the law as drafted will not prevent the next financial crisis (see here, for example). The Council on Foreign Relations discusses the law in an accessible manner with some good links here.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White has divided Dodd-Frank’s ninety-five mandates into eight categories. She released a statement last week touting the Volcker Rule, the new regulatory framework for municipal advisors, additional controls on broker-dealers that hold customer assets, reduced reliance on credit ratings, new rules for unregulated derivatives, additional executive compensation disclosures, and mechanisms to bar bad actors from securities offerings. 

Notwithstanding all of these accomplishments, only a little over half of the law is actually in place. In fact, according to the…