Breadcrumb
Extended Viewer
Ric Marshall
Executive Director, MSCI ESG Research
About the Contributor
Ric Marshall is Executive Director in the ESG Research team. Previously, he was Chief Analyst at GMI Ratings, which was acquired by MSCI in 2014. Ric was named one of the top individual analysts in corporate governance by respondents to the Thomson Reuters Extel 2013 global survey.
HTML Displayer Portlet
Blog posts by Ric Marshall
Extended-lister
-
BLOG
Exxon Mobil: Drilling Down on the Proxy Vote
Jun 1, 2021 Ric Marshall , Harlan Tufford
Learn MoreThe historic win of at least two seats on Exxon Mobil’s board by activist shareholder Engine No. 1 signals a dramatic shift in investors’ thinking about climate change — and in their willingness to vote for climate action. But there is a deeper story.
-
Investors may think that zombies live only in people’s imaginations, but these brain-munching monsters can haunt corporate boardrooms for years, eating away at a fundamental shareholder right: the right to duly elected representation.
-
The SEC has proposed reforms to the proxy process that would curb the number of proposals submitted by small shareholders. But such a change may disadvantage all shareholders, who have provided significant levels of support for these initiatives.
-
BLOG
2020 ESG trends to watch
Jan 13, 2020 Linda-Eling Lee , Meggin Thwing Eastman , Ric Marshall
Learn MoreESG themes are long-term, but some can emerge with sudden force. We are watching five trends we believe will unfold in 2020 to catapult ESG investing into the new decade.
-
Some large asset owners are increasingly coming to believe that many executive pay schemes don’t align the interests of CEOs and investors. There appears to be an increasing focus on pay plan simplicity and transparency.
-
Two companies, one highly disruptive business model, multiple big challenges looming. Few IPOs in recent memory have attracted more attention – or disappointed more decisively, initially – than the IPOs of ride-sharing groups Uber and Lyft. At the end of June 7, 2019, two months following its IPO, Lyft’s share price traded at 17.7% below its IPO price, while Uber’s ended that same day 1.9% lower. Could ESG considerations have played into investors’ thinking?
-
Has CEO pay reflected long-term stock performance? In a word, “no.”. Companies that awarded their Chief Executive Officer (CEOs) higher equity incentives had below-median returns based on a sample of 429 large-cap U.S. companies from 2005 to 2015.
-
Just as the MSCI ACWI Index includes companies representative of a diversity of industries and equity markets, it also includes a diversity of ownership forms, ranging from fully controlled companies to those companies that are so widely held that their largest shareholder owns no more than 2% of shares.
-
Do entrenched boards help or hurt stock performance of publicly held companies? We found that the involvement of entrenched boards, particularly at family-dominated firms, was a positive attribute over the five-year period ending March 2015, in both the U.S. and emerging markets.