Do Social Movements Spur Corporate Change? The Rise of “MeToo Termination Rights” in CEO Contracts

Do social movements spur corporate change? This Article sheds new empirical and theoretical light on the issue through an original study of executive contracts before and after MeToo. The MeToo movement, beginning in late 2017, exposed a workplace culture seemingly permissive of high-level, sex-based misconduct. Companies typically responded slowly and imposed few consequences on perpetrators, often allowing them to depart with lucrative exit packages. Why did companies reward rather than penalize bad actors, and has the movement disrupted this culture of complicity? The passage of time since the height of the movement allows us to investigate these issues empirically, using the lens of executive contracts. Economic theory posits that CEO employment agreements are not negotiated at arm’s length and contain terms that strongly favor the executive. We hypothesize that these dynamics—typically associated with outsized compensation packages—resulted in pro-executive termination provisions that left room for executives to engage in sexbased misconduct without fear of reprisal. We argue that the MeToo movement represented a major shock to these bargaining dynamics and predict that, in the face of new reputational and liability risks, corporate boards will seek to reserve greater power to terminate CEOs for sex-based misconduct in post-MeToo agreements. We test—and substantiate—our hypotheses using a novel dataset of CEO employment agreements. We focus on changes to the contractual definition of a “forcause” termination. In the wake of MeToo, we find a significant and growing rise in the prevalence of what we call “MeToo termination rights”—definitions of cause that permit companies to terminate CEOs without severance pay in cases of harassment, discrimination, and violations of company policy. Such grounds for cause broadly capture most forms of sex-based misconduct. This documented rise in “MeToo termination rights” holds important lessons for corporate governance, executive contracting, and gender equity. First, our results show that external shocks can disrupt traditional corporate bargaining dynamics, bringing contract terms more in line with changing expectations. Second, our results provide insight into contract design, suggesting possible tradeoffs that companies make in structuring these novel termination rights. Finally, our results can be understood as reflecting a realignment of the treatment of top-level executives with the treatment of ordinary workers, who have long been subject to capacious sexual harassment policies. We conclude that the rise in “MeToo termination rights” offers evidence of increased corporate control of CEO behavior and greater institutional accountability for sex-based misconduct. We are therefore cautiously optimistic about the long-term effects of MeToo and the ability of powerful social movements to inspire change within private institutions

Using fMRI connectivity to define a treatment-resistant form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

A mechanistic understanding of the pathology of psychiatric disorders has been hampered by extensive heterogeneity in biology, symptoms, and behavior within diagnostic categories that are defined subjectively. We investigated whether leveraging individual differences in information-processing impairments in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could reveal phenotypes within the disorder. We found that a subgroup of patients with PTSD from two independent cohorts displayed both aberrant functional connectivity within the ventral attention network (VAN) as revealed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) neuroimaging and impaired verbal memory on a word list learning task. This combined phenotype was not associated with differences in symptoms or comorbidities, but nonetheless could be used to predict a poor response to psychotherapy, the best-validated treatment for PTSD. Using concurrent focal noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalography, we then identified alterations in neural signal flow in the VAN that were evoked by direct stimulation of that network. These alterations were associated with individual differences in functional fMRI connectivity within the VAN. Our findings define specific neurobiological mechanisms in a subgroup of patients with PTSD that could contribute to the poor response to psychotherapy.PEV was supported by the Medical Research Council (grant no. MR/K020706/1) and is a Fellow of MQ: Transforming Mental Health (MQF17_24)

Plattform för studentprojekt i datortekniksundervisning baserad på Chipkit Uno32

För laborationer i datortekniksundervisning på KTH används för närvarande Nios II-processorn på utvecklingskortet DE2. Processorn skiljer sig från den MIPSprocessor som används i resten av kursen och den tillhörande utvecklingsmiljön är komplicerad. Ett tidigare kandidatexamensarbete har undersökt möjligheten att byta ut den nuvarande plattformen mot utvecklingskortet Uno32 från Digilent Chipkit. Planer finns även att utöka kursen till att innefatta ett projektmoment där studenterna använder plattformen självständigt. I syfte att utvärdera hårdvaruplattformen utvecklas en serie exempelprojekt som även demonstrerar hårdvaran. Under arbetet utvecklas också en fri utvecklingsmiljö som ska vara enkel att installera och använda för studenterna. Slutsatserna som dras är att den fria utvecklingsmiljön som tas fram är ett framtidssäkert alternativ som är mer hårdvarunära än Digilent MPIDE, men smidigare än Microchip Mplab X då ingen programmeringsutrustning krävs. Från de utvecklade exempelprojekten dras slutsatsen att hårdvaruplattformen är en möjlig projektplattform för datortekniksundervisning, men att den behöver testas av studenter i undervisningen.Laboratory exercises in the computer hardware engineering course at Royal Institute of Technology are currently based around the Nios II processor running on the Altera DE2 development board. The Nios II processor differs from the MIPS processor taught during lecures, and the accompanying development environment is complicated to use. A previous bachelor’s thesis has explored the possibility of replacing the current platform with the Uno32 development board from Digilent Chipkit. Plans also exist to extend the course with more independent project work, where students would use the hardware platform on their own. To evaluate the hardwareplatform, a series of example projects are developed. These projects are also aimed to be used in demonstion of the platform and as a base for the students’ own projects. In the process, a toolchain and development environment based on free software is developed with the goal of being easy to install and use by students. In conclusion, the developed free software toolchain is a future-proof and viable alternative to Digilent Chipkit MPIDE and Microchip Mplab X. The free software toolchain is lower level than the MPIDE Arduino environment, but easier to use than Mplab X since extra programming hardware is not needed. The developed example projects hint that Uno32 is a viable hardware platform for education, but more thorough student testing is required to draw further conclusions

Do Social Movements Spur Corporate Change? The Rise of “MeToo Termination Rights” in CEO Contracts

Do social movements spur corporate change? This Article sheds new empirical and theoretical light on the issue through an original study of executive contracts before and after MeToo. The MeToo movement, beginning in late 2017, exposed a workplace culture seemingly permissive of high-level, sex-based misconduct. Companies typically responded slowly and imposed few consequences on perpetrators, often allowing them to depart with lucrative exit packages. Why did companies reward rather than penalize bad actors, and has the movement disrupted this culture of complicity? The passage of time since the height of the movement allows us to investigate these issues empirically, using the lens of executive contracts. Economic theory posits that CEO employment agreements are not negotiated at arm’s length and contain terms that strongly favor the executive. We hypothesize that these dynamics—typically associated with outsized compensation packages—resulted in pro-executive termination provisions that left room for executives to engage in sexbased misconduct without fear of reprisal. We argue that the MeToo movement represented a major shock to these bargaining dynamics and predict that, in the face of new reputational and liability risks, corporate boards will seek to reserve greater power to terminate CEOs for sex-based misconduct in post-MeToo agreements. We test—and substantiate—our hypotheses using a novel dataset of CEO employment agreements. We focus on changes to the contractual definition of a “forcause” termination. In the wake of MeToo, we find a significant and growing rise in the prevalence of what we call “MeToo termination rights”—definitions of cause that permit companies to terminate CEOs without severance pay in cases of harassment, discrimination, and violations of company policy. Such grounds for cause broadly capture most forms of sex-based misconduct. This documented rise in “MeToo termination rights” holds important lessons for corporate governance, executive contracting, and gender equity. First, our results show that external shocks can disrupt traditional corporate bargaining dynamics, bringing contract terms more in line with changing expectations. Second, our results provide insight into contract design, suggesting possible tradeoffs that companies make in structuring these novel termination rights. Finally, our results can be understood as reflecting a realignment of the treatment of top-level executives with the treatment of ordinary workers, who have long been subject to capacious sexual harassment policies. We conclude that the rise in “MeToo termination rights” offers evidence of increased corporate control of CEO behavior and greater institutional accountability for sex-based misconduct. We are therefore cautiously optimistic about the long-term effects of MeToo and the ability of powerful social movements to inspire change within private institutions

Kisspeptin modulates sexual and emotional brain processing in humans

BACKGROUND. Sex, emotion, and reproduction are fundamental and tightly entwined aspects of human behavior. At a population level in humans, both the desire for sexual stimulation and the desire to bond with a partner are important precursors to reproduction. However, the relationships between these processes are incompletely understood. The limbic brain system has key roles in sexual and emotional behaviors, and is a likely candidate system for the integration of behavior with the hormonal reproductive axis. We investigated the effects of kisspeptin, a recently identified key reproductive hormone, on limbic brain activity and behavior. METHODS. Using a combination of functional neuroimaging and hormonal and psychometric analyses, we compared the effects of kisspeptin versus vehicle administration in 29 healthy heterosexual young men. RESULTS. We demonstrated that kisspeptin administration enhanced limbic brain activity specifically in response to sexual and couple-bonding stimuli. Furthermore, kisspeptin’s enhancement of limbic brain structures correlated with psychometric measures of reward, drive, mood, and sexual aversion, providing functional significance. In addition, kisspeptin administration attenuated negative mood. CONCLUSIONS. Collectively, our data provide evidence of an undescribed role for kisspeptin in integrating sexual and emotional brain processing with reproduction in humans. These results have important implications for our understanding of reproductive biology and are highly relevant to the current pharmacological development of kisspeptin as a potential therapeutic agent for patients with common disorders of reproductive function. FUNDING. National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Wellcome Trust (Ref 080268), and the Medical Research Council (MRC)