Earnouts are contractual agreements in merger and acquisition (M&A) deals that link part of the acquisition price to the future performance of the target company. These contracts seem to be a panacea for adverse selection and valuation risk issues in M&As. However, earnouts are not very popular....

In this Chapter, we briefly survey the common law's adventures with creditor protection over the course of American history with a special focus on Delaware, the most important jurisdiction for corporate law. We examine the evolution of the equitable doctrines that judges have used to answer a...

When shareholders of a target firm expect a value improving takeover to be successful, they are individually better off not tendering their shares to the buyer and the takeover potentially fails. Squeeze-out procedures can overcome this free-riding dilemma by allowing a buyer to enforce a payout...

College presidents and football coaches are frequently criticized for their high compensation. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms are unmerited, as the markets for both college presidents and football coaches exhibit properties consistent with a competitive labor market. Both parties'...

The commentators and the media pay particular attention to the compensation of high profile individuals. Whether these are corporate CEOs, or college football coaches, many critics question whether their levels of remuneration are appropriate. In contrast, corporate governance scholarship has...

Using a hand-collected sample of 1,739 class actions that challenge the fairness of M&A transactions from the period 2003 through 2012, we examine the effectiveness of plaintiffs' law firms. From out of the 336 law firms in our sample, we determine the top law firms based on their popularity...

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive empirical study on China's derivative suits as introduced in the 2005 Company Law reform that provides insight into the way Chinese courts have interpreted and applied this remedy. It is found that the statutory regime appears to have had a...

In the first months after a decision of the Delaware Supreme Court upholding a fee-shifting bylaw under which the unsuccessful plaintiff shareholder was required to reimburse all defendants for their legal and other expenses in the litigation, some 24 public companies adopted a similar provision...

M&A transactions are governed by contracts that exhibit constrained variation – they are negotiated, yet full of boilerplate, tailored, yet full of patterns and regularities. This paper (a chapter of the Research Handbook on Mergers and Acquisitions, forthcoming) reviews the suite of contracts...

This article addresses what legal and financial advisors can do to conduct an M & A process in a manner that: i) promotes making better decisions; ii) reduces conflicts of interests and addresses those that exist more effectively; iii) accurately records what happened so that advisors and their...