.. and the professor is on holiday this week, but it seems impossible to turn off completely if you're interested in corporate governance. Every time I open a newspaper something relevant pops out to get me thinking about research issues. And reading my Twitterfeed keeps me in touch. I have several contacts on Twitter (some of whom I know in Real Life) who do an amazingly helpful job of reading very widely and tweeting links to all sorts of useful reports and articles. I don't know how they find the time!
Usually I just take a quick look at the linked pages and bookmark them for later: sometimes later never comes.. but while I'm on leave I have time to read a bit more carefully if something really catches my attention, this for example (thanks to Dina):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/listing-decisions-of-uk-companies-motivations
This survey provides some interesting insights into what influences companies in making decisions about listings but covered only a limited sample of 31 companies. It is full of caveats about representativeness but, as I've discovered in much recent reading, those are likely to be lost if the findings are more widely reported. (Also note that it carries the authoritative imprimatur of BIS. I wonder how they review commissioned reports: at ICAEW all the research we fund is rigorously scrutinised from start to finish.)
The topic of this example is not very controversial but in other areas it could make a big difference. The recent Credit Suisse report illustrates this:
http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/cs_women_in_leading_positions_FINAL.pdf?docID=17902
The authors of the report make it extremely clear that they have identified correlation between gender diversity and corporate performance but that the causes of this remain opaque. Not all the press reports of this study made this clear. The CS report is pretty comprehensive but there are some important studies omitted. Sadly the only people to note this seem to be the "anti-feminist" campaigners, who are more likely to focus on the studies indicating negative correlation, just as those at the other end of the spectrum will focus on those indicating positive correlation - for example, people who, for their own political purposes, are pushing very hard for regulation to enforce greater representation of women on boards. Angela Merkel and Viviane Reding come to mind.. (Eventually my paper on all this will get written...)
We could probably use a Ben Goldacre pulling apart some of the poor press reporting of social science.
Yesterday I went to hear Raj Thamotheram speak on responsible and sustainable investing. His talk was part of a course being run by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/ Raj is a great speaker. You can read about him here: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=16019900&trk=tyah He has lots of experience as an investor so can talk with considerable authority about the issues. I spend much of my time thinking about how corporate power can be controlled. Raj's thinking is more positive: he wants to see corporate power harnessed and used to do good, through the influence of investors. I'm rather too old and cynical to cheer for his suggestions as to how this might be achieved but I applaud his work and really hope he can persuade like-minded people to make things happen.
He cited Unilever as an example of a company doing good beyond lip service to CSR through establishing, with WWF, the Marine Stewardship Council. I had a quick look at Unilever's web site while he was talking: 5 women NEDs out of 12, and not all recent appointments, but only two women on the "leadership executive". What we don't know is why women join boards: are they attracted to companies which are already doing good things or are they attracted to companies where they think they can make a change for the better? That's the research that someone needs to do - and do properly, so that the findings are reliable. Not short phone chats with small numbers of people selected who-knows-how (here's another: http://www.warrenpartners.co.uk/pdf/mind-the-gender-gap.pdf).
So, many thanks to my Tweeting friends for finding me links to thought-provoking stuff, even though the worst of it should sink without trace...
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