BUSINESS

Women want to climb the corporate ladder — but not at any price. The consulting firm Spencer Stuart recently published a study of top management at Fortune 500 companies, the 500 richest companies in the United States. The analysis focused specifically on the gender of the people in these positions, their functions and the source of their appointments, whether they came from inside or outside the organization. Studying the composition of top management, often referred to as the C-Suite, is particularly important since it allows us to see how many women make it to the position of CEO in an organization. Respectively Dean of the John Molson School of Business, and an expert for several decades on the place of women in the upper echelons of the business world, we will discuss the main find...

How corporate landlords are eroding affordable housing — and prioritizing profits over human rights. One factor driving the housing crisis across the country is a shift away from publicly built housing toward large corporate-owned buildings where, as today’s guest Prof. Nemoy Lewis puts it, “housing is treated as a commodity, not a human right.” For many people living in Canada, housing has emerged as one of the most challenging issues. This is especially true in our largest cities, where financial stress plagues many households. Home ownership is widely out of reach and for renters, housing is scarce, expensive and precarious. In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, vacancy rates are at their lowest levels in nearly two decades and average rents have jumped nearly 10 per cent — the sharpe...

I studied 1 million home sales in metro Atlanta and found that Black families are being squeezed out of homeownership by corporate investors. In the years since the Great Recession, when housing prices dramatically fell, Wall Street investors have been buying large numbers of single-family homes to use as rentals. As of 2022, big investment firms owned nearly 600,000 such properties nationwide. Critics say this practice drives up home prices and worsens the housing shortage, making it harder for families to afford to buy. Industry advocates dismiss such charges, arguing that large investment firms own a tiny fraction of single-family rental housing across the U.S. – less than 4% of the total. As a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, I wanted to understand how this trend was affecti...