Topic:
Corporate Governance, Market Efficiency
The idea that corporate management should focus on maximizing shareholder value is under attack, often in hyperbolic terms, with this idea blamed for great and varied harm (e.g., underinvestment, inefficiency, inequality and the failure of people to appreciate the film Ishtar). Recently, James Montier of the esteemed, including by me, money manager Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., voicing the views of many, wrote a piece calling it âThe Worldâs Dumbest Idea.â[1] In addition, attacks have appeared in The New York Times and in TheWall Street Journal. A simple web search shows this to be a concept with many prominent learned detractors and few public defenders.[2]
Luckily for markets and the economy, this is not the worldâs dumbest idea â not close. Itâs imperfect, as all things are, but itâs not even a little bit âdumb.â
Alas, many who think they are attacking âmaximize shareholder valueâ have misidentified their target. Instead they oppose some practices and ideas that often get mistakenly jumbled together. There are debates to be had about all of these disputes, but few touch on the core issue of maximizing shareholder value. Some attacks are by authors genuinely concerned about, and looking to improve, markets; while others are thinly veiled anticapitalist screeds. Either way, they are pointing their fire in the wrong direction.
Basically, if capital markets price things well (with few ex ante errors, or put differently, the market is close to âefficientâ) then maximizing shareholder value is a very good idea. Believing that markets make common and giant predictable errors is the only legitimate beef one can have with maximizing shareholder value, and itâs absolutely fair to debate this tenet.
But instead of confining the debate to this central point, or even realizing that this is the central point, critics attack shareholder value for many ancillary reasons. For instance, they laugh off the concept as vacuous, the absence of a strategy. They attack shareââbased and particularly optionsââbased compensation. They attack markets and managers for being too âshort-term.â[3]They attack the titular idea as inducing the âexpectations game,â something they hold in great contempt. Finally, they attack â and at least this salvo is on the core concept â the idea that the firm should be run for its owners, instead of for a diffuse and sometimes amorphous set of stakeholders. Some critics have valid and important points about these things. However, as I will explain, with little exception, they are not actually criticizing the shareholder value idea at all.
What Is âMaximizing Shareholder Valueâ?
First, letâs step back and examine what the idea of âmaximizing shareholder valueâ is and why itâs intimately tied up in how âefficientlyâ the market prices shares.[4] Put simply, itâs the idea that managementâs efforts should go into maximizing todayâs stock price. Gee, that does sound very shortââterm doesnât it? I mean, it has the word âtodayâsâ in it and thatâs pretty darn short-term! Maybe the critics are onto something?
Well, it really isnât and they really arenât. Why? Because todayâs stock price is itself the marketâs forecast of what the firm is worth considering the rest of eternity (only the first few millennia really matter). The market values Apple higher than Commodore International not on a current whim, but because the expected future cash flows to Appleâs owners (shareholders) are ridiculously higher than those to Commodore Internationalâs (OK, I may have gilded the lily by choosing a foil that went bankrupt a long time ago, but Iâm a bitter former Amiga owner).
When management takes action today, in principle and mostly (yes, just mostly, Iâll get to that) in fact, the price today moves based on the marketâs collective assessment of that actionâs effect on the long-term value of the company. It only looks short-term to those who donât understand this, donât want to understand this, or keep hearing about this âMartin Galeâ fellow and dismiss him as some British or Canadian crank. Of course, this is all only if the market is working reasonably âefficiently.â
So How âEfficientâ Is the Market?
Alas, markets arenât perfect. Few things are perfect. Markets get things wrong every day (certainly clear after the fact, which is often mistaken for the point, but sometimes clear even before the fact) and sometimes do so rather spectacularly. For instance, I am more than willing to call the technology episode of 1999-2000 a âbubble,â and shared the trenches with GMO and others in doing so real-time. Now, going the other way, I also think the term âbubbleâ is grossly overusedthese days. That is, there is a bubble in saying âbubble.â In other words, I think bubbles do occur, just rarely.
In particular, as one type of imperfection, the market may be too âshort-term.â Earlier I discussed how todayâs stock price is not actually a âshort-termâ measure but our best guess of long-term value. But that doesnât make it a perfect guess, and, at the risk of overusing this term, one way it may be imperfect is for price to move too much based on âshort-termâ not âlong-termâ events. I have written elsewhere that truth probably lies somewhere in between those who assert markets are wildly inefficient and those who assert they are nearly perfectly efficient. Thankfully, âimperfectâ markets can be pretty darn useful. Anyway, if the problem one has with the concept of maximizing shareholder value is that markets are too short-term, then it seems exhorting, cajoling and educating us all to be more long-term in setting prices would be a better solution than attacking the goal of maximizing shareholder value. Indeed, some take this tack, pointing out where they think management is focusing too much on the short-term, and recommending reforms, particularly accounting reforms, that they feel will better deliver shareholder value, as opposed to bizarrely scuttling the concept because, perhaps, we can do better. Frankly, if critics are not urging that we work on better delivering true shareholder value, then Iâm not really sure what their solutions are, so Iâm a little scared!
Stepping back, one must admit that the marketâs long-term record, warts and all, is superb. If markets priced things as poorly as the critics assert, directly or by implication, weâd expect to see societies that adopted them floundering, while societies that adopted the opposite â and please pause and consider for a moment what the opposite really is â flourish. More mundanely, if the critics were right in their stridency, weâd expect to see an abundance of consistently successful active stock pickers regularly beating the market by taking the money of rubes who bought into short-term stories spun by venal management (though the truism that the average canât beat the average would still hold). Rather, over the long term, we see few such outrageously successful active managers with the total number a lot closer to that expected from random chance (though probably exceeding it by a bit).
Considering all the evidence, we must conclude that markets are imperfect. But actually we knew that going in, as nothing is perfect. More specifically, the market makes ex ante errors and very rarely it makes large predictable ones. But overall, it has proven a highly effective way of setting prices and close enough to âefficientâ that few have consistently beaten markets. Furthermore, other means of setting prices, or worse, allocating resources without prices, have been utter tragic failures compared to the marketâs success.
Focusing on the Stock Price Is Not a Strategy: Yes, but DuhâŚ
One common refrain among critics is the true statement âmaximize shareholder value is not a strategy but the result of a strategy.â Indeed they are correct, one does not enhance shareholder value by meditating on the stock price, stalking it or covering the walls with pictures of it all connected by push-pins and string. One maximizes it by creating value, the most you can. The practical details of this vary tremendously from company to company, but usually entail having some combination of great products, perhaps a mission that is truly beneficial to the world, satisfied customers or clients, and a team of employees that is motivated to deliver. Those who think theyâve made a trenchant telling critique by pointing out that âmaximize shareholder value is not a strategyâ are not wrong, but they must tell us what and who exactly they are criticizing. Who thinks itâs a strategy unto itself and not the result of a good strategy? Maximizing shareholder value is an objective. Of course you still need a strategy to get there!
Options-Based Compensation
The criticsâ most common target is probably management compensation that is tied to share price, and particularly options-based compensation. Tying management compensation to share price might be, on net, a bad idea; particularly when the plan is oneââsided options-based (Iâm not arguing this point here, or conceding it, just admitting itâs possible).[5] Options-based compensation may indeed often, though for no necessary reason, be used by those waving the shareholder-value banner, but the critics fall here for the post hoc fallacy.
There are legitimate causes for concern with stock-based compensation. First, if, as discussed above, the market has any tendency to be too âshort-term,â admittedly so will the price of shares or options given to management. But, again, the accusations of âtoo short-termâ are hurled with way too much confidence.[6]
Second, the âone sidedâ part of options-based compensation may matter as it gives management an incentive to maximize the value of its options which, a bit ironically given this is exactly what weâre arguing about, is not the same as the value of the common shares.[7] How can they be at odds? Well, options on shares are a somewhat different beast than shares themselves and this difference carries over to when theyâre used as compensation. You can increase option value by, all-else-equal, raising volatility and thatâs not necessarily in the shareholdersâ best interest. Now, in the presence of debt, shares are also an option on the value of the company but options of a lesser gamma (sorry for the brief geekdom) and donât have nearly the same bias. In fact, while perhaps they have a point in isolation (perhaps!), much of the criticism of maximizing shareholder value has been more about oneââsided optionsââbased compensation[8] than the more basic notion of management maximizing share price. Those raising this argument should be clear they are criticizing a specific practice â options-based compensation â and not the idea of maximizing shareholder value.
continue reading: https://www.aqr.com/cliffs-perspective/shareholder-value-is-undervalued