Practitioners and academics have long assumed that financial markets value the deal-specific legal terms of public company acquisition agreements, yet legal scholarship has failed to subject this premise to empirical scrutiny. The conventional wisdom is that markets must value the tremendous...

Delaware dominates the market for company incorporations, which places America's second smallest state in charge of determining the corporate governance framework for most public and private companies. The unresolved question is the basis for Delaware's appeal compared to other states. We set...