Barton et al (2017)
Barton, Dominic, James Manyika, Tim Koller, Robert Palter, Jonathon Godsall, and Josh Zoffer. Where companies with a long-term view outperform their peers. McKinsey Global Institute, February 2017.
Excerpt: "Corporate short-termism has been the subject of ongoing debate among leaders in business, government, and academia for more than 30 years, but hard evidence that short-termism genuinely detracts from company performance and economic growth has remained scarce. To fill this gap and better understand capitalism for the long term, we have created a systematic measurement of long- and short-termism at the company level. Our findings show that companies we classify as “long term” outperform their shorter-term peers on a range of key economic and financial metrics."
LK comment: Lawrence Summers has additional commentary on this report (e.g., “I would give a Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’ to their case” and “some of what is done in the name of long term may be unmonitored waste”) here:
http://larrysummers.com/2017/02/09/case-still-out-on-whether-corporate-short-termism-is-a-problem/