Director Ownership, Governance, and Performance

We study the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on the relationship between corporate governance and company performance. We consider 5 measures of corporate governance during the period 1998–2007. We find a significant negative relationship between board independence and operating performance during the pre-2002 period, but a positive and significant relationship during the post-2002 period. Our most important contribution is a proposal of a governance measure, namely, dollar ownership of the board members, that is simple, intuitive, less prone to measurement error, and not subject to the problem of weighting a multitude of governance provisions in constructing a governance index

Epigenetic coordination of transcriptional and translational programs in hypoxia

ABSTRACT Adaptation to cellular stresses entails an incompletely understood coordination of transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene expression programs. Here, we quantified hypoxia-dependent transcriptomes, epigenomes, and translatomes in T47D breast cancer cells and H9 human embryonic stem cells. This revealed pervasive changes in transcription start site (TSS) selection associated with nucleosome repositioning and alterations in H3K4me3 distribution. Importantly, hypoxia-associated TSS switching was induced or reversed via pharmacological modulation of H3K4me3 in the absence of hypoxia, defining a role for H3K4me3 in TSS selection independent of HIF1-transcriptional programs. By remodelling 5’UTRs, TSS switching selectively alters protein synthesis, including enhanced translation of mRNAs encoding pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase 1 ( PDK1) that is essential for the metabolic adaptation to hypoxia. These results demonstrate a previously unappreciated mechanism of translational regulation during hypoxia driven by epigenetic reprogramming of the 5’UTRome

Why is Ownership Endogenous?

[EN] A recently published paper by Gugler and Weigand (2003) addresses the problem of the endogeneity of ownership, but an unresolved question remains. Where does this endogeneity come from? It is shown that the main source of endogeneity is the simultaneity between ownership and value