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Once-Sleeping Giants Awake

By Herbert S. Wander and Aaron J. VanGetson
April 01, 2004

Mention Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) to a board member of a publicly held corporation, particularly a corporation with significant institutional ownership, and the reaction will undoubtedly be mixed. Why? Just as the takeovers of the 1980s spurred institutional stockholders into taking a greater role in corporate governance, so too have the corporate scandals of recent years caused a stir among once-passive institutional stockholders. They increasingly use ISS recommendations to vote their stock holdings, and as a result, ISS's recommendations are garnering a fair amount of attention in corporate board rooms.

ISS Voting Policies

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