经济类文章精选：Staggering

经济类文章精选：Staggering Things are slow to change in America's boardrooms THE annual review of American company board practices by Korn/Ferry, a firm of headhunters, is a useful indicator of the health of corporate governance. This year's review, published on November 12th, shows that the SarbanesOxley act, passed in 2024 to try to prevent a repeat of corporate collapses such as Enron's and WorldCom's, has had an impact on the boardroomalbeit at an average implementation cost that Korn/Ferry estimates at $5.1m per firm. Two years ago, only 41% of American firms said they regularly held meetings of directors without their chief executive present; this year the figure was 93%. But some things have been surprisingly unaffected by the backlash against corporate scandals. For example, despite a growing feeling that former chief executives should not sit on their company's board, the percentage of American firms where they do has actually edged up, from 23% in 2024 to 25% in 2024. Also, disappointingly few firms have split the jobs of chairman and chief executive. Another survey of American boards published this week, by A.T. Kearney, a firm of consultants, found that in 2024 14% of the boards of SP 500 firms had separated the roles, and a further 16% said they planned to do so. But by 2024 only 23% overall had taken the plunge. A survey earlier in the year by consultants at McKinsey found that 70% of American directors and investors supported the idea of splitting the jobs, which is standard practice in Europe. Another disappointment is the slow progress in abolishing "staggered" boardsones where only onethird of the directors are up for reelection each year, to threeyear terms. Invented as a defence against takeover, such boards, according to a new Harvard Law School study by Lucian Bebchuk and Alma Cohen, are unambiguously "associated with an economically significant reduction in