Nov

14

Apple, from Steve Ellison

November 14, 2010 |

One advantage Apple has is that its CEO is its founder. From an abstract of a paper on this topic:

"Eleven percent of the largest public U.S. firms are headed by the CEO who founded the firm. Founder-CEO firms differ systematically from successor-CEO firms with respect to firm valuation, investment behavior, and stock market performance. Founder-CEO firms invest more in R&D, have higher capital expenditures, and make more focused mergers and acquisitions. An equal-weighted investment strategy that had invested in founder-CEO firms from 1993{2002 would have earned a benchmark- adjusted return of 8.3% annually. The excess return is robust; after controlling for a wide variety of firm characteristics, CEO characteristics, and industry affiliation, the abnormal return is still 4.4% annually. The implications of the investment behavior and stock market performance of founder-CEO led firms are discussed."

The agency problem, which founder-led companies avoid, is as vexing as ever. Conventional wisdom is that corporate governance is enhanced by outside directors and non-CEO chairmen of boards. Trojan academics find that actual results do not support this theory :

This paper investigates the influence of corporate governance on financial firms' performance during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Using a unique dataset of 296 financial firms from 30 countries that were at the center of the crisis, we find that firms with more independent boards and higher institutional ownership experienced worse stock returns during the crisis period. Further exploration suggests that this is because (1) firms with higher institutional ownership took more risk prior to the crisis, which resulted in larger shareholder losses during the crisis period, and (2) firms with more independent boards raised more equity capital during the crisis, which led to a wealth transfer from existing shareholders to debtholders. Overall, our findings cast doubt on whether regulatory changes that increase shareholder activism and monitoring by outside directors will be effective in reducing the consequences of future economic crises.


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