A bill under consideration on Capitol Hill would fundamentally remake the online digital display advertising market by forcing the physical separation of a vertically integrated market and by imposing fiduciary-like duties on those buying and selling online ads for others. Proponents of this...

The expression “personnel is policy” has become a truism in Washington. Yet our understanding of how the political branches use appointments to project influence into the administrative state is incomplete. This Article leverages data on almost one-thousand commissioners on eleven major...

We examine the cooperative production of corporate governance.We explain that this production does not occur exclusively within a“team” or “firm.” Rather, several aspects of corporate governance are quintessentially market products. Like Blair and Stout, we view the shareholder as but...

This paper examines the impact of early childhood characteristics of top corporate decision makers on firm policies and value. Using a unique dataset, we study the effect of CEO birth order, family size, socioeconomic status, parent occupational choices and childhood trauma, all of which have...

Digital assets are hot right now. Whether cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, or initial coin offerings and tokens, this new asset class has captured the imagination of American investors. While it remains to be seen if this phenomenon has staying power, there is no doubt that these assets and their...

It has long been said that market forces alone will result in a problematic under-sharing of information by public companies. Since the 1930s, the main regulatory response to this market failure has come in the form of the massive mandatory-disclosure regime that sits at the foundation of modern...

We examine the value of CEOs with specialized professional skills by focusing on CEOs with law degrees and their effect on corporate litigation. We find that lawyer CEOs are associated with both lower litigation frequency and less severe litigation. This relation is observed for most of nine...

Modern securities regulation has three main areas, each of which is plagued by a core problem. Mandatory disclosure law leaves society with suboptimal disclosure, as the government calls for too little of some information (for example, management analysis of company prospects) and too much of...

Corporate information that moves stock-market prices sits at the center of modern securities regulation. The Great Depression-era securities laws at the foundation of the field require much mandatory disclosure of this type of information. They also include a strict anti-fraud regime to ensure...