We extend our prior work on how both supply (including the emergence of OTC equity derivatives and growth in share lending) and demand (including the growth of hedge funds) factors now facilitate the large-scale, low-cost decoupling of shareholder voting rights from shareholder economic...

This is a summary, practitioner-oriented article which summarizes our research on debt and hybrid decoupling. Equity decoupling refers to the unbundling of the rights and obligations normally associated with shares. Debt decoupling refers to the unbundling of the economic and governance rights...

Most U.S. public companies have a single class of voting common shares: voting power is proportional to economic ownership. Linking votes to shares is often thought to be desirable, because, as residual claimants, shareholders have an incentive to exercise voting power well. The linkage also...

The United States has many banks that are small relative to large corporations and play a limited role in corporate governance, and a well developed stock market with an associated market for corporate control. In contrast, Japanese and German banks are fewer in number but larger in relative...

We often hear that hardly anyone wants to sit on corporate boards these days, largely because they fear personal liability. Our investigation of seven representative countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States) suggests that the liability concern is...

There is increasing evidence that broad measures of firm-level corporate governance predict higher share prices. However, almost all prior work relies on cross-sectional data. This work leaves open the possibility that endogeneity or omitted firm-level variables explain the observed...

We extend here our prior work, which focused on equity decoupling (Hu and Black, 2006, 2007, 2008), by providing a systematic treatment of debt decoupling and an initial exploration of hybrid decoupling. Equity decoupling involves unbundling of economic, voting, and sometimes other rights...

Prior work in emerging markets provides evidence that better corporate governance predicts higher market value, but very little on the specific channels through which governance increases value. We provide evidence, from a natural experiment in Korea, that reduced tunneling can be an important...