This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the economic consequences of financial reporting and disclosure regulation. We integrate theoretical and empirical studies from accounting, economics, finance and law in order to contribute to the cross-fertilization of these fields....

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...

We document that firms' management of accounting earnings increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), with a significant increase during the period prior to SOX, followed by a significant decline after passage of SOX. However, the increase in earnings...

This Article briefly reexamines the great debates on the role of insider trading in the corporate system from the perspectives of efficiency of capital markets, harm to individual investors, and executive compensation. The focus is on the mystery of why trading by all kinds of insiders as well...

In both the publicly-traded corporation and the private donative trust a crucial task is to minimize the agency costs that arise from the separation of risk-bearing and management. But where the law of corporate governance evolved in the shadow of capital-market checks on agency costs, trust...

This paper discusses empirical evidence on the costs (and benefits) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), particularly from stock returns and firms' going-private decisions. Zhang (2006) analyzes stock returns around key legislative events and concludes that SOX and its provisions have imposed...

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...

This article argues that mandatory securities disclosure regulation has unanticipated and ill-considered consequences. Disclosure regulation makes some forms of behavior more expensive relative to others. Rational actors will respond by shifting some conduct into comparatively cheaper outlets....