Takeover defenses have long been a topic of considerable interest to scholars of finance and corporate law. Yet the significant amount of attention that researchers have lavished on the topic have produced surprisingly little scholarly consensus. This chapter considers a number of major topics...

The power of shareholders to replace the board is a central element in the accepted theory of the modern public corporation with dispersed ownership. This power, however, is largely a myth. I document in this paper that the incidence of electoral challenges during the 1996-2005 decade was very...

This paper reconsiders the basic allocation of power between boards and shareholders in publicly traded companies with dispersed ownership. U.S. corporate law has long precluded shareholders from initiating any changes in the company's basic governance arrangements. I show, and support with...

European corporate law and corporate governance are moving ahead beyond expectation. Some British voices called this “a renaissance in the past decade”. In December 2012, the European Commission came forward with an Action Plan that combines both corporate law and corporate governance rules...

On 16 July 2018, a new corporate governance code was published. As with previous iterations, it applies on a ‘comply-or-explain' basis, whereby companies are required to either comply with provisions or explain reasons for non-compliance. However, the new code substantially simplified the...

Embraced by US managers in the 1980s as a lifeline in a sea of hostile takeovers, the poison pill fundamentally altered the trajectory of American corporate governance. When a hostile takeover wave seemed imminent in Japan in the mid-2000s, Japanese boards appeared to embrace this American...