This paper, which introduces the special issue on corporate governance co-sponsored by the Review of Financial Studies and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), reviews and comments on the state of corporate governance research. The special issue features seven papers on corporate...

This paper develops a framework for analyzing transactions that transfer a company's controlling block from an existing controller to a new controller. This framework is used to compare the market rule, which is followed in the United States, with the equal opportunity rule, which prevails in...

While staggered boards have been documented to be negatively correlated with firm valuation, such association might be due to staggered boards either bringing about lower firm value or merely reflecting the tendency of low-value firms to have staggered boards. In this paper, we use two natural...

We investigate the relationship between CEO centrality -- the relative importance of the CEO within the top executive team in terms of ability, contribution, or power -- and the value and behavior of public firms. Our proxy for CEO centrality is the fraction of the top-five compensation captured...

Focusing on takeover bids whose outcome can be predicted in advance with certainty, Grossman and Hart established the proposition, which subsequent work accepted, that successful bids must be made at or above the expected value of minority shares. This proposition provided the basis for Grossman...

In a corporate freeze-out, the controller is required to compensate minority shareholders for the no-freezeout value of their shares that are taken from them. This paper seeks to highlight the difficulties involved in determining this no-freezeout value when private information. In particular,...

The agents to whom shareholders delegate the management of corporate affairs may transfer value from shareholders to themselves through a variety of mechanisms, such as self-dealing, insider trading, and taking of corporate opportunities. A common view in the law and economics literature is that...

This paper analyzes the effects of the legal rules governing transnational bankruptcies. We compare a regime of territoriality' -- in which assets are adjudicated by the jurisdiction in which they are located at the time of the bankruptcy -- with a regime of universality are adjudicated in a...

In some cases, the law permits a party that unilaterally provides a benefit to another party to recover the estimated value of this benefit. Despite calls for expanding the set of cases to which such a restitution rule applies, the law commonly applies a mutual consent rule under which a party...

In many disputes, the expected value to the plaintiff from going to trial is negative, either because the chances of winning are small or because the litigation costs are large. While such a plaintiff would not go to trial, he might sue in the hope of extracting a settlement offer: the defendant...