This article links the growing income disparity in America to a possible metric that can be used to better assess the appropriate level of executive compensation. The article reviews the intellectual, commercial, cultural, and judicial forces that have each contributed toward the significant...

Mutual funds have enjoyed phenomenal growth with their numbers exceeding the number of public companies and their assets aggregating in excess of $9 trillion. Increasingly they are the investment instrument of choice by the proverbial widows, widowers and orphans, and a few school teachers are...

The accounting and financial scandals the last few years not only produced the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but have prompted a good deal of debate what forces led to so many dramatic reporting failures. This article is the only work to examine how the competitive structure of the accounting industry...

This paper investigates the rationale behind interfirm tender offers by examining the returns realized by the stockholders of firms that were the targets of unsuccessful tender offers and firms that have made unsuccessful offers. Our results suggest that the permanent positive revaluation of the...

This paper examines the wealth impact of share repurchases that restrict participation to a particular sub-set of a firm's stockholders. Repurchases at a premium from insiders and small shareholders increase the wealth of non-participating stockholders and are therefore consistent with the...

There are three reasons for attempting to reach a common understanding of the responsibilities of sovereign borrowers and their lenders. First, the flow of capital to sovereign debtors is exceptionally important to the world economy. Industrialized countries rely on it to finance their budget...

The external debt of emerging market sovereign borrowers is now mainly in the form of bonds held by numerous institutional and individual bondholders. Many of these bonds are governed by the law of the state of New York. As a matter of drafting convention, bonds for sovereign issuers governed by...

In many job settings, there will be some promotion criteria that are less amenable to measurement than others. Often, what is difficult to measure is more important. For example, possessing "good judgment" under pressure may be a better predictor of success as a law firm partner than the ability...

For over a decade, contracts literature has focused on standardization. Scholars asked how terms become standard, and why they change so rarely. This line of inquiry painted a world where a standard term persists until it is dislodged by another standard term, perhaps after a brief window of...

In this article, we combine two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate widely among elite transactional lawyers. Surprisingly, the stories portray lawyers as ineffective market actors who are...