The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 mandated a number of regulatory reforms including a requirement that large U.S. public companies provide their shareholders with the opportunity to cast a non-binding vote on executive compensation. The “say on pay” vote was designed to rein in excessive levels of...

We address the heated debate over the staggered board. One theory claims that a staggered board facilitates entrenchment of inefficient management and thus harms corporate value. Consequently, some institutional investors and shareholder rights advocates have argued for the elimination of the...

The Trump administration has promised to pursue policy through deals with the private sector, not as an extraordinary response to extraordinary events, but as part and parcel of the ordinary work of government. Jobs would be onshored through a series of deals with employers. Infrastructure would...

How should we understand the federal government's response to the financial crisis? The government's team, largely staffed by investment bankers, pushed the limits of its statutory authority to authorize an ad hoc series of deals designed to mitigate that crisis. It then decided to seek...

We examine the “value” a PBC form provides for publicly-traded corporations. We analyze the structure of the PBC form and find that other than requiring a designated social purpose it does not differ significantly in siting control and direction with shareholders. We also examine the purpose...

In merger agreements, the seller makes contractual representations and warranties (“reps”) about the state of the target, e.g., attesting to the accuracy of the target’s financial statements. We obtain a proprietary sample of claims for breaches of the reps in acquisition agreements...

The dramatic events of the financial crisis led the government to respond with a new form of regulation. Regulation by deal bent the rule of law to rescue financial institutions through transactions and forced investments; it may have helped to save the economy, but it failed to observe a...

We examine firm lifecycles of 3,081 IPOs from 1996-2012. We find that small IPOs have a different lifecycle than other, larger companies. Within five years of an IPO, only 55% of small IPOs remain listed on a public exchange, compared to 61.3% and 67.1% for middle and large capitalized...

The exogenous shock of the financial crisis made shareholders and regulators particularly attuned to financial firm performance. We thus use the financial crisis as a natural experiment to study labor market consequences for outside directors at banks and other financial companies. Examining...