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Increased engagement by investors with the companies in which they invest has been a major change in Western economies since the 1980s. Shareholder value provides rationale and incentive for investor engagement. The book summarizes the basic principles of shareholder value, and explains the reasons for its growth, especially in the UK and the USA. The authors outline a spectrum of investor engagement ranging from indirect/laissez-faire influence via (threat of) exit to direct intervention in specific areas of management practice. The book focuses on two types of investor, institutional investors and private equity/venture capital investors. Different types of institutional investors have different incentives for engagement, and adopt different methods. ‘Universal investors’ with long time horizons, such as pension funds, have especially strong incentives for engagement, as illustrated by USS Limited. The book distinguishes between institutional investors' routine and extraordinary engagement, and shows how collaboration amongst investors through organizations such as the Institutional Shareholders' Committee offsets the high costs of monitoring and provides means for ensuring compliance with ‘best City practice’. The engagement of private equity funds is illustrated through case studies of equity funds and the portfolio firms in which they invested. But corporate managers are not simply passive reactors to investors' interventions: managers seek to influence investors, for example through managing market expectations. Shareholder value conceptions are not universal: they are strong in the UK and the USA, but are weaker in coordinated market economies such as Germany. The book concludes by evaluating the normative case for shareholder value and investor engagement, arguing that conventional analyses overestimate the efficiency arguments for shareholder value and the equity arguments against shareholder value. The future development of corporate governance is seen to require greater openness and the inclusion of a wider range of interests, not the further enhancement of the protection accorded to shareholder interests.

This book tells the story of the sweeping makeover of the 200-year old campus of the University of North Carolina. Six million square feet of new buildings were constructed and a million square feet of historic buildings were renovated during one vibrant ten-year period. To make this massive growth work required bold thinking. A new Master Plan created a vision for combining historic preservation, green building, and long-range development. A statewide bond issue for higher education capital facilities, supplemented with outside support, generated $1.5 billion in capital funding. Previous town-gown tensions were swept aside as university officials and elected leaders collaborated on critical planning and zoning innovations. Award-winning plans and designs inspired new student living and learning communities. University facilities and construction staff doubled and a design review board formed to handle the increased load of new projects. Detailed design guidelines ensured that new development would be compatible with the traditional campus landscape as well as sensitive to environmental conservation. Written by authors who held major planning roles and supplemented with key player interviews, the book describes the politics, planning, and design that shaped the Dynamic Decade. Illustrated with color photographs and maps, this comprehensive account offers lessons to all concerned with sustainable university growth.

Social Security in the United States and in Europe is at a critical juncture. In this book, a number of chapters discuss the challenges facing Social Security reform in the aging societies of Europe. A remarkable range of European nations — Germany, France, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Hungary — have implemented or are about to implement mixed Social Security systems that combine a traditional defined benefit of the pay-as-you-go system with an individual retirement account defined contribution of a capital-funded system. The chapters here highlight the problems that the European pension reform process faces and how it differs from that of the United States.