In the campaign to flatter and defend CEOs and BoDs, Marty Lipton and his partners at Wachtell pursue many strategies. These feature his ongoing battles with corporate finance and corporate law scholars about the impact of activist investing on investor returns.

In this effort, Wachtell frequently cites the work of Yvon Allaire and the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations (IGOPP). Lipton praises these efforts as “sophisticated “ and “academically rigorous”. He trots them out when he needs to oppose academic research that supports a positive impact of activism.

We always wondered about Allaire and IGOPP. We read this stuff with skepticism, but read it we do. The most recent analysis, on proxy access, was such a confusing morass it prompted us to dig a little deeper.

We’ll let scholars like Lucian Bebchuk defend specific work against Allaire’s criticism. We’re more curious about the individual and the institution that Wachtell praises so exuberantly. We found just another corporate lackey, the association with which should insult working academics everywhere.

What is IGOPP?

Mostly a vehicle for Yvan Allaire. Calling it a think tank or institute diminishes other similar research organizations everywhere else.

It looks like a think tank. Based in Montreal, it has three “founding partners”: a big public university (Concordia), the Quebec financial markets regulator, and the charitable foundation for an asset manager (Jarislowski).

15 Canadian businessmen and women sit on its BoD, including Allaire and IGOPP executive director Michel Nadeau (Allaire is the “executive chair” of the BoD). Some have conflicts and overlaps, such as Stephen Jarislowski; the professor who holds the Jarislowski chair at the Molson business school at Condordia; the Dean of the Molson business school, and a member of the Molson family.

The staff includes Allaire, Nadeau, and six others. Francois Dauphin serves as Director of Research, with other staff as project managers or administrators. They appear mostly to run numerous training programs and seminars, which probably constitutes a very nice revenue stream.

Since 2005, IGOPP published 8 policy papers, 70 articles and columns for business or news media, and 3 books. Almost all criticize activist investing in one way or another. Every one shows Allaire as the principal author. Dauphin is a frequent co-author. A few list one of a couple of other co-authors. Hardly a diverse, free-thinking locus for the clash of ideas.

Who is Yvan Allaire?

A former management consultant and corporate executive, Allaire has a slightly elusive background. He earned a Ph.D. from MIT-Sloan in 1973, with a baffling dissertation that seems to have something to do with marketing.

We can’t find a CV or any other profile of his research activities. His official biography at IGOPP lists consulting jobs and his sole company position (Bombardier), and repeats his various publications and roles at IGOPP.

Allaire clearly aspires to academia. He has 20 entries at SSRN, many with Dauphin as co-author. A few list Mihaela Firsarotu, evidently a strategy professor at the University of Montreal at Quebec. We can’t find a CV for her, either. Her SSRN page lists only the IGOPP papers with Allaire. We found nothing anywhere about Dauphin, not even a basic LinkedIn profile.

Allaire evidently publishes his stuff only through IGOPP. His SSRN archive has almost only his IGOPP stuff. He does not appear to have submitted any papers to refereed journals. He doesn’t present them at academic workshops. The only peer review he receives is from his hand-picked BoD, who votes on the policy papers.

Anyone can write about anything these days, and find an audience online. It stretches credulity, though, that Allaire and IGOPP have managed to build a profile as respected academics on such a flimsy foundation.

It should embarrass genuine academics, from Columbia, NYU, and Rutgers, that Wachtell includes Allaire’s baloney with their work as “important studies by prominent economists and law professors.” There’s plenty of interesting and rigorous research on all sides of the debates on activist investing. Yet, understanding and using this body of work demands more than just adopting a pet academic pretender, one which merely supports one’s own professional biases, as one’s own.