How Corporate Governance Reforms Spread

Recent research on the adoption of majority voting rules provides some insight on how corporate governance reforms are adopted and change company behaviour, and suggests that reforms may have the greatest impact on firms that are late to adopt them.

The push for majority voting, which requires that directors receive a majority (rather than a plurality) of the votes cast in order to be elected, has been highly successful, with over 90% of S&P 500 companies adopting some form of majority voting by January 2014. Majority voting is intended to make boards more accountable to shareholders. A recent paper by a group of U.S. authors tries to determine if it actually works, and in the process makes an interesting observation about the spread of corporate governance reforms.¹