Independent governance services firm Glass Lewis and Equilar, an executive compensation benchmarking service, have announced a strategic partnership to provide institutional investors and corporate issuers with enhanced analysis of executive compensation and corporate governance matters.

As part of the partnership, Glass Lewis' Proxy Paper research will be available to corporate issuers via the Equilar platform. In addition, Glass Lewis is working with Equilar to integrate Equilar's "market-based peer groups" and realizable pay data into Glass Lewis' new version of the Glass Lewis P4P, a proprietary analysis of pay for performance at public companies.

Since 2003, Glass Lewis has helped investor clients identify the outliers in the area of pay for performance through the evaluation of the linkage between executive compensation and corporate performance relative to peers. Glass Lewis' P4P model examines seven indicators of shareholder wealth and business performance:

Stock price change;

Change in book value per share;

Change in operating cash flow;

EPS growth;

Total shareholder return;

Return on equity; and

Return on assets.

It also analyzes two compensation data points: the chief executive's total compensation and the top five executives' total compensation. Each of these nine metrics is compared against those of the company's peers to create a weighted-average executive compensation score and a weighted-average performance score.

Among the key enhancements to Glass Lewis' P4P will be the incorporation of market-based peer groups developed using Equilar's algorithm for analyzing publicly-disclosed relationships among thousands of companies in order to create a network of the strongest peers. Factors that determine connection strength include: direction of peer relationships, similarity between peer groups, number of connecting paths between two companies and distance of connecting paths between two companies.

During the 2012 main proxy season, Glass Lewis will complete the beta phase of its enhanced P4P model. For meetings on or after July 1, 2012, Glass Lewis' Proxy Paper reports will include the new, enhanced version of P4P analysis featuring peer groups derived from the Equilar algorithm.

A full description of the partnership and benefits will be discussed on a Proxy Talk conference call jointly hosted by Glass Lewis and Equilar on Feb. 22 at 1:00 pm ET.

For more information on Glass, Lewis & Co. and Equilar, or if interested in attending the proxy talk, please contact: Jaron Schneider, (415) 738-4115, jschneider@glasslewis.com; www.glasslewis.com; Nick Ezzo, (650) 241-6677, nezzo@equilar.com; www.equilar.com