Stephen Davis: On the Rise of Investor Stewardship.

Welcome to the Boardroom Governance Podcast. I’m your host, Evan Epstein. In this episode, I talk with Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors. He co-chairs the Advisory Board of Hawkamah, the corporate governance institute based in the UAE; serves on the founding supervisory board of Stewardship Professionals e.V. (StePs); and is a co-founder of the Capital+Constitution project sponsored by the Brookings Institution and United States Democracy Center. Stephen has been actively involved with corporate governance matters since 1988 when he founded the Global Shareholder Services unit at the IRRC, in Washington, DC. He has been a nonresident senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, where he co-directed the World Forum on Governance; a senior advisor on governance at Teneo; and outside advisor to the Nissan Special Committee on Improving Governance. From 2007-2012 he was executive director of the Yale School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance and Lecturer on the SOM faculty. In this podcast, we talk about the history of investor advocacy, the evolution of international corporate governance, and how U.S. corporate governance has evolved since the late ‘80s, particularly with the rise of institutional investors. We also talk about current issues including stewardship, pass-through voting power, ESG and sustainable finance. We finally address dual-class share structures and his involvement as the founding Chairman of the BPP Oversight Committee, a self-regulated body overseeing the proxy advisory industry. If you like this show, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing this podcast on social media. You can find all the show notes on the website boardroom-governance.com and please feel free to subscribe to the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at evanepstein.substack.com