
How “Shareholder Value” Is Killing Innovation - nreece
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/shareholder-value-is-killing-innovation
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ABCLAW
Prof. Lazonick's piece is interesting, but it seems like there are other
forces at work, too. The central thrust of his argument is that public markets
have not lived up to their function as capital providers to firms, noting that
american markets have been cash negative. He then notes that this is caused by
result the prioritization of shareholder value, which consequently undervalues
research and other innovation.

Let me provide an alternative thesis: Firms weigh the value of research and
have recognize it is too expensive to be more useful than returning money to
shareholders. They do this because the tools they use to understand their
capital tell them that's the case. But there's an issue there: What if those
tools are wrong and the quantified value of research endeavors is commonly
calculated wrong. If that's the case it isn't a problem with prioritizing
shareholder value that's at issue, but instead an issue with research being
unfairly handicapped in a fight against a share buy-back or dividend payment
on the finance sheets.

Research valuation is commonly undervalued because alternative use cases for
the capital rarely, if ever, account for the erosive effects of competition
upon their margins and sale volume. Accordingly, at steady state, large firms
predispose themselves to stop researching once they've finished growing and
reached stable market pricing. There was a fantastic article about this, but I
can't seem to find it, but there is support from an econometric perspective
that this effect is visible in the markets though [1].

[1]
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0022-1082.00411/f...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/0022-1082.00411/full)

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raleighm
One of the few compelling reasons to go public is to give employees with stock
access to liquidity. As article notes, public companies pay in order to
provide this. It's a good thing to do for employees. It's a narrow,
idiosyncratic view of "value" that views that as "value destroying".

Also, how companies ought to financed, organized and managed _if_ the purpose
of a company is rewarding value creators as oppose to maximizing shareholder
ROI generally is a discussion worth having, but how public companies (anyway a
tiny fraction of all companies) use the stock market in practice doesn't
necessarily tell us that that's what the purpose ought to be. One is an "is"
and the other is an "ought" and anyway the connection between the two is
pretty loose.

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gallerdude
Kind of disagree. The best companies focus on the long term. Making short term
profits may boost you, but only short term (duh).

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danek
That's the point, that it's better to focus on long term but the game puts a
lot of pressure on you to optimize for short term

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model_m_warrior
One assumes any worthwhile company has strategies for both short-term and
long-term profits.

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omarforgotpwd
Interesting take, but a focus on shareholder value is of course actually very
important for sustainable innovation. The author questions the idea that the
stock market is a source of capital that is beneficial to corporations by
pointing out that the stock market actually draws money out of corporations.
He seems to think that this is wrong, hampers innovation and investment in the
core businesses, creates income inequality with rich investors taking all the
money away from the people who are actually innovating, etc.

To me this seems like a very narrow way of looking at things. Of course on net
the stock market takes money away from corporations. If the market were not on
net transferring money to shareholders why would anyone want to buy shares? It
is exactly these cash extractions from successful corporations that allow
risky new companies (which may fail and loose all of the investors money) to
raise money on the market. People are willing to risk losing their money on
some crazy new idea precisely because they will be able to extract profits if
the company is successful. If companies didn't pay their investors back, there
would be 0 incentive to give them the cash they need to get off the ground in
the first place.

Secondly, it makes no sense to denigrate the people repeaing the benefits of a
corporations success as "value extractors" as opposed to the "value creators"
at the company. First off, as the article points out employees of the company
are compensated with stock and stock options and thus the share price and
earnings growth is an important factor in attracting and retaining talent. If
the company is focused on creating shareholder value and the stock price is
going up that's only going to help the quality of the team and their
innovative capabilities. What do people do with the money they make in the
stock market? Many times, reinvest it in another innovative company! Is using
money from past successes to fund promising new enterprises at startups and
existing corporations a bad thing? I think it's a good thing and very
important. Let's not forget that people owning shares aren't just Wall Street
fat cats. There are retail investors and ordinary people's retirement funds
too, and extracting money from corporations to fund people retirements is a
good thing too.

In fact, a company can invest as much or as little as it wants in research and
innovation. There is no requirement at all that a corporation pay a dividend
or buy back stock. Amazon doesn't, but investors can still profit off share
price growth because there are other investors willing to buy the shares
expecting that there will be dividends and buy backs in the future as Amazon's
earnings continue to grow.

Now of course it is entirely possible that management could make short sighted
decisions and under-invest in the business to boost the share price in the
short term but ultimately decrease the long term value of the shares because
of the lack of innovation. However, in an ideal world where information is not
hidden hopefully management, shareholders and the board would notice this kind
of short sighted behavior and try and push for the business maximize the long
term value of the business.

The system can sometimes create some perverse incentives, but I think it is
safe to say that on the whole corporations focusing on shareholder value is a
net-positive for innovation in the world.

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honestoHeminway
Im from germany, i have seen family controlled companys regularly out-pace
performance and innovation-wise by shareholder companys, whose shares where
distributed and volatile.

There is in particular a type of CEO who regularly appears and lines up his
short-term interest with the short-term interest of the volatile shareholders,
turning the whole company into Swag and leaving afterwards. There is no
mechanism to punnish this or refuse rewards after shortterm gains on substance
losses.

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DataWorker
And I think the quarterly reorting cycle helps exacerbate this problem.

I would love to have my views altered if someone can point to cases where r&d
benefits from the current state where quarterly reports seem to make or break
companies.

