China is now, and increasingly, an integral player in the global economy and in international relations. Economic and political restructuring in China today is affecting the lives of millions, yet only a small number of top bureaucrats and wealthy regime-backed entrepreneurs are making the basic...

General Motor's ability to exit bankruptcy through a public offering of its common stock (IPO) depended heavily on the sacrifices of active and retired members of the United Auto Workers (UAW). A review of the now public filings of GM related to the IPO indicate the significant concessions UAW...

This is the final published book chapter version of an earlier working paper on the impact of private equity in modern capitalism. The book is The Embedded Firm: Corporate Governance, Labor and Finance Capitalism, Cambridge, 2011. The editors are Peer Zumbansen and Cynthia Williams

The initial public offering (IPO) of Facebook is the most important failed IPO in the history of the American capital markets. Explanations for the failure largely focus on the widely publicized problems at Nasdaq, the exchange venue where the offering took place, and the role of the investment...

New forms of stockholder activism call into question longstanding assumptions underpinning our system of corporate governance. Scholarship has largely failed to explain the basis for these new forms and, in particular, the differences among activists. Activists are not one undifferentiated mass....

Insider trading is not widely understood. Insiders of corporations can, in fact, buy and sell shares of those corporations. But, over time, Congress, the courts and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have imposed significant limits on such trading. The limits are not always clearly...

This paper examines the impact of authoritarian left theory, in particular that of Che Guevara, on labor rights during the Sandinista's Nicaraguan revolution. This is important because of the current revival of movements like that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela that rely on similar approaches to...

New forms of stockholder activism call into question longstanding assumptions underpinning our system of corporate governance. Scholarship has largely failed to explain the basis for these new forms and, in particular, the differences among activists. Activists are not one undifferentiated mass....

This book (Vandeplas 2013 available now at Amazon.com) argues that during the decade long rule of the Sandinista movement in 1980s' Nicaragua, discussion of the origins and development of that nation's revolution was greatly hindered by a polarization between two basic points of view. On the one...

Corporate law theory finds itself at an impasse, unable to explain or resolve the intense and frequent crises that beset modern capitalism. This impasse is currently expressed in a very public debate about the “purpose” of the corporation. Both sides of this debate – agency theory and...