The Link Between Corporate Governance and Performance: Year 2000 Update

How have the studies on the link between governance and performance evolved over the last several years? One study suggests that shareholder proposals serve primarily as a signaling mechanism indicating that negotiations have been unsuccessful. Another summarizes institutional investor activism in the United States: “A small number of American institutional investors, mostly public pension plans, spend a trivial amount of money on overt activism efforts…. The currently available evidence, taken as a whole, is consistent with the proposition that the institutions achieve the effects on firm performance that one might expect from this level of effort—namely, not much.”