The Corporate Monitoring Newsletter

Issue #2 - March 1999

Written by Mark Latham

IN THIS ISSUE:

1. New working paper: "The Road to Shareholder Power"

2. Exchange views with me in person: Conference schedule

3. Should we create an internet discussion forum?
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1. NEW WORKING PAPER

My previous papers, such as "The Corporate Monitoring Firm"
(http://www.corpmon.com/CorpMonFirm.htm), propose giving
shareholders more influence over management by having
independent agencies handle board nominations. But this plan
is so ambitious that it seems difficult to get started.

I recently figured out how to get there from here in easy
stages. The key step is to change the way proxy advisory
firms are paid. Instead of each investor paying for advice,
shareholders should vote to have their corporation pay a
proxy advisor to make recommendations available to them all.
This may not appeal to the advisory firm with the biggest
market share now, but its competitors should find the
arrangement so attractive that they would offer this service
almost free to get it off the ground.

This would also pave the way for voting by individual
investors via the internet, with professional advice freely
available, and software to permit convenient decisions like
"vote all with management" or "vote all with advisor X".

These ideas are presented in a new working paper,
"The Road to Shareholder Power", available at
http://www.corpmon.com/publications.htm
Your comments would be much appreciated.
_____________________________________________________________

2. MY CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

In the hope of meeting some of you and discussing corporate
governance in person, here are some conferences I will be
attending. Please let me know if you will be there and
would like to meet.

March 29-30: Washington DC, Council of Institutional
Investors semi-annual meeting (http://www.ciicentral.com/)

May 6: Stanford University Institutional Investor Forum

May 20: Security Analysts of San Francisco luncheon.
Presenting working paper. (http://www.sasf.org/socsche1.htm)

June 2: Nottingham Trent University (UK) Conference on
Corporate Governance. Submitted working paper.
(http://www.ntu.ac.uk/cos/cac/courscon.html) [also planning
to visit Germany, the Netherlands and France in June]

September 25-26: University of Calgary (Canada), Northern
Finance Association meeting. Presenting working paper.
(http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~nfa99/)
_____________________________________________________________

3. (HOW) SHOULD WE CREATE AN INTERNET DISCUSSION FORUM?

Would you like to have a newsgroup (or some such thing) for
open discussion of corporate monitoring and related ideas?
Please let me know.

An unmoderated forum has the benefit of avoiding opinionated
censorship (by me!), but my impression is that the signal-to-
noise ratio can get rather low. The two formats I have seen
are a newsgroup and an e-mail list. Is there a better way?

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