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Journeys with Erasmus: Risk, Responsibility, and the Role of Shareholder Activism in the Current Crisis

Tuesday 21 April 2009

"The financial crisis has already been in progress for over one-and-a-half years. During that time, have shareholders helped to steer boards of directors in the right direction? Away from irresponsible risk-taking?” Wouter Bos, Minister of Finance, The Netherlands, commenting at the International Corporate Governance Network Mid-Year meeting on 3 March 2009. 

The current financial crisis requires us to rethink corporate governance and the reforms that we have seen in the last decade. Although the consensus before the crisis was that shareholders have a legitimate role in controlling the public firms they own, this attitude has been crumbling in the wake of the worst financial crisis the world has seen since the 1930s. Questions that are now on the agenda of both business and regulators include:

 To what extent are shareholders of financial institutions responsible for the current crisis?
 Are regulators and standard-setters also to blame for the crisis, due to lack of supervision?
 Has the growing influence of shareholders in public firms around the world resulted in more short-term-ism and excessive risk taking? 
 What is the proper role of shareholders in public firms to begin with?
 Do institutional investors have a special role and special obligations?
 What do we know about shareholder activism in public firms? Does it increase shareholder value?
 Does shareholder activism come at the expense of other corporate constituencies or social and environmental interests?

These questions will need to be answered before policy makers and corporate managers can make changes for the better.

Hosted by Dean George Yip, three distinguished professors from the Rotterdam School of Management outline their views on corporate governance and the current financial crisis. You are invited to join this conference and actively participate in this debate.

Programme
19.30 
Opening by Prof. dr. George Yip, Dean of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

19.40 – 20.30 
Plenary 
Prof. dr. Abe de Jong, Professor of corporate finance and corporate governance 
Prof. dr. Gerard Mertens, Professor of financial analysis
Prof. dr. Hans van Oosterhout, Professor of corporate governance and responsibility

20.30 – 21.30 
Dialogue with the Audience

Venue
Novotel Brainpark Rotterdam

REGISTRATION:
Please register no later than Friday (17 April 2009) using our online registration form: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=lXC42UOQFeB7nv_2f_2fS_2fMryQ_3d_3d 
Participants of the Erasmus Instituut Monitoring & Compliance and employees of the Erasmus University Rotterdam can participate for free. Other participants pay a fee of € 15,00 (students € 5,00) 

A limited number of places is available. Attendees will receive a confirmation.

About our speakers

Prof. Dr. Abe de Jong
Abe de Jong is Professor of Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. He has a PhD in Economics from Tilburg University and has been a faculty member at Tilburg University and Florida State University. His research interests are in empirical finance and governance. His work has been published in outlets such as Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Banking & Finance, Financial Management and International Journal of Industrial Organization. He has also written policy reports on corporate governance for/on the Peters and Tabaksblat Committees, the Ministry of Finance and the Social-Economic Council. Currently, Abe works on empirical studies in capital structure choice, behavioral finance and the history of finance and governance.

Prof. Dr. Gerard Mertens
Gerard Mertens is Professor of Financial Analysis at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and Chair of the department Accounting & Control. He received his Masters degree in Applied Economics from Radboud University and a PhD in Accounting from Maastricht University. He has held prior positions at Nyenrode Business School, Tilburg University and CentER, the Limperg Institute, University of Leuven and Maastricht University.

His work has been published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, European Accounting Review, International Journal of Accounting and the Journal of Management & Governance among others. He has also contributed chapters to various books on financial reporting and corporate governance. He commissioned several research projects on corporate governance for the Dutch Ministry of Finance, the Monitoring Committee Corporate Governance and Eumedion. Since 2005 he is a board member of the Netherlands Institute for Corporate Governance (NICG). He is an advisor to Eumedion (a Dutch corporate governance platform of institutional investors). His research interests include financial reporting and disclosure strategies, earnings management, (corporate) governance, executive compensation and risk management.

Prof. Dr. Hans van Oosterhout
Hans van Oosterhout (1965) is Professor of Corporate Governance and Responsibility at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. He obtained an MA (Cum Laude) in Political Science from Leiden University (DATE?), and a PhD in Management from Erasmus University (2002). His research interests include: the positive and normative theory of organisations and institutions, comparative corporate governance, business ethics, and the position of corporations in the global institutional matrix. He has published in journals like Academy of Management Review, Organisation Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Business Ethics Quarterly and the Journal of Business Ethics. Hans has held visiting appointments at Australian National University (2002) and at the department Legal Studies and Business Ethics of The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2003, 2008), and currently serves as a member of the executive board of the Erasmus Institute for Monitoring and Compliance. He is currently engaged in research on: (1) the costs and benefits of centralised managerial decision-making in public firms; (2) the corporate governance problems of other forms of enterprise organisation (such as cooperatives and professional partnerships); and (3) the questions of legitimacy that arise on account of the agency problems that separate managers and the owners of firms, on the one hand, from parties external to the firm, on the other.