Podcast #86 | Stephen Davis: On the Rise of Investor Stewardship.

In episode #86 of the Boardroom Governance Podcast, Evan Epstein talks with Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors.

Stephen 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 Stephen was the executive director of the Yale School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance and Lecturer on the SOM faculty. He is also the past chair of the Independent Oversight Committee overseeing the global proxy voting industry’s Best Practices Principles for Shareholder Voting Research.

In this podcast, Stephen and Evan discuss:

👉 The history of investor advocacy, from Isaac Le Maire (VOC) to anti-Apartheid sanctions and divestment.
👉 The evolution of international corporate governance.
👉 The rise of institutional investors, ESG and responsible stewardship.
👉 The proxy advisory industry and its "monitored self-regulation."
👉 Dual-class share structures.
👉 Corporate governance opportunities and challenges in the Middle-East and Africa.

You can listen to the episode directly in the Boardroom Governance Podcast website (where you can find all the show notes), or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts such as in: Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon or Stitcher.

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