Impact of Reporting Frequency on UK Public Companies
28 Pages Posted: 31 May 2017
Date Written: March 1, 2017
Abstract
Corporate executives have long decried the undue emphasis on short-termism - defined as maximizing corporate profits in the next quarter. Instead, most corporate executives say that they want to make corporate investments from a long-term perspective - defined as enhancing corporate value over a period of three to five years (Rappaport 2006).
This concern about favoring short-termism over long-termism has now spread to institutional investors (Perrin 2016). In an open letter, Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, warned US companies that they may be harming their long-term value by capitulating to pressures from activist hedge funds to increase dividends or share buybacks in the short term (Fink 2015).
In response, commentators and regulators have proposed a broad range of remedies to curb short-termism in corporate America (Pozen 2014). These proposals include, but are not limited to, higher taxes on short-term trading, faster filings for groups acquiring more than 5% of a company’s voting stock, reduced say by institutional investors in managerial decisions, and increased voting rights for shareholders based on the length of their holding period.
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