John Conway And Harvard

Bay Area tech moguls backed group to draft Ed Lee for mayor

A committee to draft Ed Lee for mayor — an entity separate from the embattled Run, Ed, Run campaign — received $7,730 in contributions from tech moguls, a Harvard professor and an equestrian instructor.

The committee Support Drafting Ed Lee for SF Mayor 2011 ran a Facebook page and produced a television commercial that aired during Sunday talk shows.

Support Drafting was run by Michael Breyer, who was appointed to The City’s Library Commission by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

According to paperwork filed Wednesday, donors include tech investor Ron Conway and Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com. That company is developing its new headquarters in Mission Bay. Both contributed $1,000 to the committee.

Another $1,000 supporter was Julie Ha, president of Mayfield College in Southern California.

In all, the committee reported 17 contributions between $100 and $1,000. The money was spent mostly on production of the commercial, airtime and Facebook ads.

Now that Lee has entered the race, the committee has been terminated. It stopped spending money after Lee declared his candidacy, said Breyer, who now plans to campaign to get him elected.

"I think he’s been doing a phenomenal job," Lee said. "He’s just staying on message and trying to talk about the issues San Francisco is facing."

Another political action committee that worked to get Lee to run for a full term in November was under almost-constant pressure by the Ethics Commission. That committee, Progress for All, refused to declare it was a committee focused entirely on getting Lee to run, and instead called itself a general purpose committee.

Breyer’s committee, however, did the opposite, documenting that the committee’s sole purpose was to draft Lee, despite the fact that he wasn’t a candidate. That distinction means Breyer’s draft Lee movement hasn’t been dogged by the Ethics Commission.

Effects of Local Director Markets on Corporate Boards — The ...

, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine how local director labor markets affect board composition and the quality of corporate governance. We document that the supply of potential directors in the local labor market strongly affects board composition of S&P 1500 companies, namely, the proportion and expertise of independent directors. For instance, in an average sample firm, a third of independent directors in S&P 1500 firms holding executive positions are employed locally.

Our empirical tests show that access to a larger local pool of prospective directors has a positive effect on the proportion of independent directors and a negative effect on the proportion of gray and inside directors found on a typical board of directors. At firms located near larger local pools of prospective directors, a significantly higher fraction of independent directors are employed locally. Overall, boards of firms located near larger pools of managerial talent include a larger percentage of independent directors who are executives from other nearby firms.

Our findings provide strong evidence of the importance of local director labor markets and the notion that distance matters in spite of technological developments that facilitate teleconferencing and other forms of information sharing over long distances. Although board meetings typically average only seven a year, the presence of directors at board meetings appears to be important for the effective execution of their oversight and advisory roles. At the margin, it appears that distance negatively affects the willingness of prospective directors to serve on boards, especially those who are full-time corporate and financial executives or holders of other professional positions, who face heavy demands on their time. Of course, firms may also benefit from selecting local outside directors to the extent that soft information about director quality cannot be fully communicated over long distances.

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