Conference organized by University of Antwerp, Harvard Law School and ECGI on 30 May
Short-termist behavior by corporations is often seen as a large societal problem. For example, Joe Biden wrote in a 2016 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal: “Short-termism […] is one of the greatest threats to America’s enduring prosperity”.
However, the debate on short-termism has so far largely focused on possible short-termism in the US and the UK). Short-termism in European corporate governance has received much less attention. A notable exception is the 2020 EY study for the European Commission on “directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance. This study is generally regarded as heavily flawed, however.
For this reason, the University of Antwerp, Harvard Law School and the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) have decided to organize a conference on “short-termism in European corporate governance” on 30 May in Antwerp. We believe that it is important to study short-termism in (continental) Europe, because corporate governance in continental Europe differs in important respects from corporate governance in the US and the UK, with potentially profound implications for the short-termism debate.
Controlling shareholders in Europe
A first important difference is that corporations in continental European countries more often have a controlling shareholder than corporations in the US and the UK. For example, according to one paper, the percentage of shares held by the largest shareholder in the corporation is much higher in France (46.4%), Germany (45.3%), Belgium (38.6%) and the Netherlands (34.6%), than in the US (21.4%) and the UK (19.5%).
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