Accounting for Insider Influence in the Proxy Process

Jackie Cook is Director, Stewardship, Product Strategy & Development in Sustainalytics’ Stewardship services team. Up to October 2021, she was director of stewardship research for Morningstar Research Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. In her present role, she leads the ESG Voting Policy Overlay offering, which offers clients a specialist ESG voting lens.

Cook joined Morningstar in October 2018 with Morningstar’s acquisition of Fund Votes Research Ltd., a company that she founded in 2007. Fund Votes had been a provider of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund proxy-voting data on corporate resolutions and shareholder proposals across ESG topics. Previously, Cook had been a senior research associate at The Corporate Library (which merged with GMI in 2010 and was acquired by MSCI in 2014) and a junior research fellow at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. Over the past 22 years, she has also worked as a consultant on governance research projects for UNCTAD and several nongovernment organizations and has published academic articles on mutual corporate form, investor advocacy, and energy governance.

Cook holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in clinical psychology from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, and a master’s degree in research psychology from Rhodes University, South Africa. She also holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics and management from Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.