In a recently released paper, “Board Declassification Activism: The Financial Value of the Shareholder Rights Projects,” we investigated the effects on firm value of board declassifications promoted by the Shareholder Rights Project (SRP), a clinical program held at Harvard Law School for...

For three academic years (2011-2014), the Harvard Law School's Shareholder Rights Project (SRP) operated a clinical program assisting institutional investors on board declassification proposals. This paper analyzes the SRP as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the value implications of...

This paper revisits the staggered board debate focusing on the long-term association of firm value with changes in board structure. We find no evidence that staggered board changes are negatively related to firm value. However, we find a positive relation for firms engaged in innovation and...

Over the past twenty years, a growing number of empirical studies have provided evidence that governance arrangements protecting incumbents from removal promote managerial entrenchment, reducing firm value. As a result of these studies, “good” corporate governance is widely understood today...

This paper studies the association between hedge fund activism and firm value, using matching procedures to mitigate the selection effects of which firms are chosen as targets by activist hedge funds. We find that targeted firms improve less in value (Q) subsequent to the start of activism than...

This paper provides novel evidence concerning the association between firm value and state corporate laws, focusing on (re)incorporations in Delaware. As (re)incorporations are endogenous, we use plausibly exogenous variation in the state of incorporation at the IPO stage from the law firm...

We show that hedge fund activism is associated with positive abnormal stock returns in both the short term and the long term. Using matching procedures to mitigate selection effects, we find that activists' targets do not outperform ex ante similar control firms; this suggests that activists are...

Managerial power theory holds that structural flaws in corporate governance, such as board defenses, enable opportunistic managers to extract excessive pay. While this theory has proven highly influential, this Article argues that it fails to answer important questions. For example, how does...