Two major banks have now admitted that their employees successfully manipulated worldwide interest rates through the London InterBank Offered Rate, the most widely used interest rate index. Libor is the interest rate term for trillions of dollars of swaps and loans, and its manipulation may have...

Rauterberg & Talley (2017) develop a data set of “corporate opportunity waivers” (COWs) — significant contractual modifications of fiduciary duties — sampled from SEC filings. Part of their analysis utilizes a machine learning (ML) classifier to extend their data set beyond the...

Financial benchmarks estimate market values or reference rates used in a wide variety of contexts, but are often calculated from data generated by parties who have incentives to manipulate these benchmarks. Since the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) scandal in 2011, market participants,...

The U.S. stock market has been transformed over the last twenty-five years. Once a market in which human beings traded at human speeds, it is now an electronic market pervaded by algorithmic trading, conducted at speeds nearing that of light. High-frequency traders participate in a large portion...

Is something wrong with the structure of the U.S. stock market? Both industry participants and scholars have recently faulted the equity market for its lack of innovation. In particular, they have emphasized that stock exchanges may not have the right incentives to provide innovative solutions...

The default rules of corporate law make shareholders’ control rights a function of their voting power. Whether a director is elected or a merger is approved depends on how shareholders vote. Yet, in private corporations, shareholders routinely alter their rights by contract. This phenomenon of...

This Article examines two “meta” issues raised by opponents of the SEC's proposal to provide shareholders with rights to place director candidates on the company's proxy materials. First, opponents argue that, even assuming proxy access is desirable in many circumstances, the existing...

The presentation slides in this document provide an overview of our study "https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2982617" The Agency Problems of Institutional Investors, which was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in its summer 2007 issue. The slides build on our...