The Business Roundtable has played a key role in the opposition to the SEC shareholder access proposal. While the strong resistance to the proposal has been thus far successful in discouraging the SEC from adopting it, this paper considers the merits of the Business Roundtable's substantive...

This paper examines the specific features of the shareholder access rule recently proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. I suggest that, even accepting the Commission's generally cautious approach and its desire to limit shareholder access to cases where the need for it is evident,...

This paper contains the edited transcripts of the Symposium on Corporate Elections held at Harvard Law School in October 2003. The symposium brought together SEC officials, CEOs, directors, institutional investors, money managers, shareholder activists, lawyers, judges, academics, and others to...

The SEC is now considering a proposal to require some public companies to include in their proxy materials candidates for the board nominated by shareholders. I document that incumbents do not currently face any meaningful risk of being replaced via the ballot box, and I argue that providing...

Leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plan (quot;ESOPquot;) transactions originated in the 1950s, yet there are still unresolved valuation issues that arise from a complex set of operating expenses, financing structures and contingent claims that are unique to leveraged ESOPs. Although complex,...

This piece provides the brief submitted to the Delaware Chancery Court by plaintiff in the case of Bebchuk vs. CA, Inc. The case concerns the attempt by CA to exclude from the corporate ballot a stockholder proposal to adopt a proposed bylaw concerning the use of poison pills on grounds that it...

This paper seeks to draw a lesson for designing major reforms of corporate governance in the future. It recalls the key events leading to the recent seismic shift in corporate governance policies applicable to American public corporations, and identifies the four sources of policy changes - the...

This article examines whether the cost of complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) contributed to the rise in going-private transactions after its enactment. Prior studies of this issue generally suffer from a mistaken assumption that by going-private, a publicly-traded firm...

U.S. corporate law has long denied shareholders the power to make rules-of-the-game decisions - that is, decisions to change the company's charter or state of incorporation. In an article published last year, The Case for Increasing Shareholder Power, I advocated providing shareholders with...

The quality of China's capital markets cannot be improved without raising the quality of its listed companies. One problem with China's capital markets is that frequent scandals involving listed companies have created market uncertainty in the eyes of investors. This paper offers an explanation...