An important tenet of a burgeoning 'law and finance' literature is that stock market development is contingent upon corporate law offering ample protection to shareholders. This paper addresses this claim, using as its departure point developments occurring in the United States between 1930 and...

Although corporate pyramids are currently commonplace world-wide and although there have been "noteworthy pyramiders" in American business history, this controversial form of corporate organization is now a rarity in the United States. The conventional wisdom is that corporate pyramids...

This Article offers the first systematic attempt to measure the development of shareholder protection in the United States across time. Using three indices developed to measure the relative strength of shareholder protection across nations, we evaluate numerically the protections corporate and...

CEO pay is a controversial issue in America but there was a time, often overlooked today, when chief executives were not paid nearly as much as they are now. From 1940 to the mid-1970s executive pay was modest by today's standards even though U.S. business was generally thriving. What worked to...

What accounts for substantial legal change? With corporate law, many think a stock market crash is key. But not all crashes lead to reform. So, what else is necessary? This paper uses a “critical junctures” model borrowed from social science to explain when and why major corporate law change...

This paper, prepared for a University of Illinois College of Law symposium honoring Prof. Larry Ribstein, deals with the historical development of corporate law in the United States, focusing on the promise and perils of quantification. The paper is part of a larger project where we have already...

In many parts of the world, it is commonplace for wealthy families and successful entrepreneurs to parlay a relatively small financial investment into control of a sprawling corporate empire through the use of a pyramid-like structure in which they directly control a firm that owns a dominant...