The increasing role professional service firms play in the reform of shareholders' meetings

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of consultants, professional service firms or knowledge intermediaries in articulating the collective action of shareholders. The regulatory background is the current proposals for the reform of General Meetings of Shareholders in Spain. General Meetings are particularly revealing of shareholder activism, as they are the forum in which shareholders' actions can be most effective. We believe that our arguments are, to a very large extent, equally applicable to other European countries, as these proposals have been put forward in Spain within the context of the wider governance reforms promoted by the Winter Report in Europe and other national and supranational regulatory efforts.shareholders meetings; corporate governance; consultants;

The New Treaty Makers

The erosion of sovereignty that is said to characterize globalization is not generally associated with any deviation from the fundamental principle that states must freely consent before they can be said to be bound by any international agreement. With few exceptions, as with respect to Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War, states are rarely told that they must adhere to any particular treaty-despite emerging notions of global governance. The initiation and conclusion of modern treaties is still generally seen as the affirmation of sovereignty, rather than its diminution. Modern treaties, the only source of international obligation said to emerge from conscious attempts to make law and still requiring the unambiguous, genuine consent of states, remain the embodiment of sovereignty as classically understood. This Article challenges this view by examining how international organizations have altered the methods by which treaty negotiations are initiated as well as the final results achieved through such negotiations. If state sovereignty has been eroded or transformed in the wake of World War II, the new forms of treaty making and the new treaty makers are part of that story

Lessons From The Akayesu Judgement

The judgment issued on September 2, 1998 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (hereinafter ICTR) finding Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty on various charges of genocide and crimes against humanity is likely to please those who have long struggled for the progressive development and effective enforcement of international criminal law

Electroweak corrections to the direct detection cross section of inert higgs dark matter

The inert higgs model is a minimal extension of the Standard Model that features a viable dark matter candidate, the so-called inert higgs ($H^0$). In this paper, we compute and analyze the dominant electroweak corrections to the direct detection cross section of dark matter within this model. These corrections arise from one-loop diagrams mediated by gauge bosons that, contrary to the tree-level result, do not depend on the unknown scalar coupling $\lambda$. We study in detail these contributions and show that they can modify in a significant way the prediction of the spin-independent direct detection cross section. In both viable regimes of the model, \mh and \mh\gtrsim 500 \gev, we find regions where the cross section at one-loop is much larger than at tree-level. We also demonstrate that, over the entire viable parameter space of this model, these new contributions bring the spin-independent cross section within the reach of future direct detection experiments.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Governance mechanisms for effective leadership: The case of Spain.

Most recent work on Boards of Directors has been focused on what can be considered best practices for effective governance in terms of roles, composition, process and style. Furthermore, this literature can be divided among very practically oriented managerial work, and more rigorous, theoretically based work. Most of the empirical research in this area has been centered on Anglo-Saxon countries. Some European countries, like Spain, have a very different governance tradition. Given this context, our present work pursues with three complementary objectives: 1. To ascertain the current status of governance practices in Spain. 2. To obtain evidence about which of these practices may be associated with effective governance. 3. To find out what factors account for the composition of General Managers’ compensation.leadership; effective governance;

The Likely Legacies Of Tadic

How will historians and others judge the Balkan war crimes tribunal? In my brief time, I would like to indicate how the prosecution of Tadic, the first case before that tribunal, has raised some doubts about that body\u27s legitimacy and likely legacy

Prácticas de gobierno en España.

El presente artículo expone los resultados de una innovadora investigación –no existe ningún trabajo de este tipo para el caso español– sobre las prácticas de gobierno y dirección de las empresas españolas. En primer lugar, se presentan los resultados sobre la situación actual de las prácticas de gobierno en España. El artículo incluye un amplio y exhaustivo estudio del consejo de administración, del comité de dirección y de la figura del jefe ejecutivo principal (sus funciones, composición, elección, funcionamiento, etc.). Además, se estudia la interrelación entre ellos y la distribución del poder dentro de la empresa. En segundo lugar, se analiza el equilibrio de poderes entre los órganos de gobierno y dirección de la empresa. Al estudiar la tipología de los consejos de administración según el «poder» del propio Consejo y del jefe ejecutivo principal, se argumenta en favor de los consejos participativos (consejos de administración y jefes ejecutivos «poderosos»), como los que mejor responden a una fórmula en la que se separan gobierno y dirección (dos tareas distintas, pero no opuestas). Finalmente, se estudia la evaluación y remuneración de los directivos, especialmente la del jefe ejecutivo principal.practicas gobierno España; consejos administracion; comite direccion;