There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy intervention. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge about the corporate landscape where rules are supposed to be implemented and the functioning of...

Exploiting staggered adoption of the universal demand (UD) laws by 23 states between 1989 and 2005 that makes filing shareholder derivative litigations more difficult, we show that reduced litigation threats improve corporate takeover efficiency. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we...

The regulation of hostile takeovers constitutes an interesting corporate governance microcosm. It is an area where clear contrasts in approach, regarding the balance of power between shareholders and the board of directors, are evident across different jurisdictions. Takeovers also reflect the...

This article is published in a special symposium edition on the work of Adolf Berle, which includes papers from a conference, In Berle's Footsteps, held in November 2009 to celebrate the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society.Shareholders, and the relationship...

This article explores the rising tension between shareholder and director power in the common law world. First the article analyzes key arguments in the shareholder empowerment debate, and current US reform proposals to grant shareholders stronger rights, from a comparative corporate law...

This Article provides a detailed case study, from a corporate governance perspective, of the 2004 decision of News Corp to migrate from Australia, where it had been incorporated for decades, and to reincorporate in Delaware. As the Article shows, News Corp.'s move to the United States was both...

Does additional shareholder liability reduce bank failure? We compare the performance of around 4,400 state-regulated banks of similar size in neighboring U.S. states with different liability regimes during the Great Depression. We find that additional shareholder liability reduced bank failure...

Corwin v. KKR, one of many recent cases aiming to mitigate the “deal tax” in M&A represented by baseless litigation, is considered one of the most important corporate law decisions of the 2000s. Corwin shields directors from the enhanced scrutiny of Revlon in favor of the business judgment...

Nobel Laureate in Economics for 2016, Oliver Hart, and economist Luigi Zingales recently published an article justifying companies' pursuit of social objectives at the expense of profits from within the shareholder primacy framework. This Essay highlights an important consequence of this...