Stephen Davis

Associate Director, Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance & Institutional Investors
Harvard Law School

Stephen Davis, Ph.D. is associate director of the Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors, and a senior fellow at the Program on Corporate Governance. He is also a non-resident senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution.

From 2007-2012 he was executive director of the Yale School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance and Lecturer on the SOM faculty.

Stephen served on the US SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, where Chair Mary Schapiro appointed him chair of the Investor as Owner Subcommittee. He is a board member and former chair of Hermes EOS, the shareowner engagement arm of Hermes Pensions Management, the UK’s largest retirement fund; co-organizer of the World Forum on Governance in Prague; Member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Long Term Investing; Member of the Contributing Committee of Development Partners International; Member of the advisory board of Cartica Capital; Member of the Private Sector Advisory Group of the Global Corporate Governance Forum; and member of the advisory boards of the Centre for Corporate Governance in Africa at Stellenbosch University and the Center for Corporate Governance at Handelshochschule Leipzig.

Stephen is President of consultant Davis Global Advisors and founder-editor of the Global Proxy Watch newsletter.

Winner of the 2011 ICGN Award for Excellence in Corporate Governance, Stephen co-authored The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), which was named by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Australian Financial Review as one of the best business books of 2006. The book has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Complex Chinese and Korean. He is also the author of “Mobilizing Ownership: An Agenda for Corporate Renewal”, published by Brookings in May 2012.

Stephen contributed to Corporate Governance in the Wake of the Financial Crisis (UNCTAD, 2011) and The Origins of Shareholder Advocacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Stephen co-chaired The Conference Board’s Working Group on Hedge Funds and served on the US National Association of Corporate Directors’ Blue Ribbon Commission on board-shareholder communications. He has testified at US congressional hearings, been a columnist for the Financial Times and Compliance Week, and is a frequent media commentator on corporate governance.

He has been named by Directorship as among the 100 most influential figures in corporate governance; by Trust Across America as among the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior; and by Competia as among ‘the most influential corporate governance tweeters.’

Stephen is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Stephen pioneered the field of international corporate governance when he founded the global unit at the IRRC, in Washington, DC. His Shareholder Rights Abroad: A Handbook for the Global Investor (1989) was the first study comparing corporate governance practices in top markets.

Stephen is a co-founder of the International Corporate Governance Network, and was its representative to the OECD. He was a member of the UNEP steering group which
produced global Principles for Responsible Investment. He co-founded GovernanceMetrics International.

Stephen earned his doctorate in international business and security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and completed undergraduate studies at Tufts and the London School of Economics. Other books include Apartheid’s Rebels: Inside South Africa’s Hidden War (Yale University Press, 1987), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Areas of Interest:

• International corporate governance
• Capital markets
• Mutual fund governance
• Corporate board chairmanship
• Board-shareowner communications