New Series: Board-Shareholder Dialogue

The OBLB is starting a new series, the Board-Shareholder Dialogue Series, featuring posts on the chapters of the forthcoming volume Board-Shareholder Dialogue: Policy Debate, Legal Constraints and Best Practices (Luca Enriques and Giovanni Strampelli eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Calls for institutional shareholder engagement with boards of directors have grown worldwide and private dialogue with one or more directors is now a key instrument for institutional investor stewardship: private discussions are the main way to convey expectations to the companies they are invested in. The demand for board-shareholder dialogue does not come from institutional investors only: companies are increasingly aware of its value. Yet despite the favourable trend towards recognizing board-shareholder dialogue as an essential element of the system of corporate governance at listed companies, such dialogue still raises questions and deserves further analysis in several respects.

Against this backdrop, the Board-Shareholder Dialogue Series will feature the papers presented at a corporate governance conference, hosted and sponsored by Assogestioni, that took place in Rome on 13-14 October 2022, and that will appear in the forthcoming book ‘Board-Shareholder Dialogue: Policy Debate, Legal Constraints and Best Practices’. This book brings together scholars in law, management and finance to reflect upon board-shareholder engagement and aims to enhance awareness of the increasing importance of board-shareholder engagement while at the same time spreading the knowledge of relevant practices and legal and policy issues across jurisdictions.

Luca Enriques is a Professor of Law at the University of Oxford.

Giovanni Strampelli is a Professor of Law at Bocconi University.

OBLB series are available here.