For those of us who, like Paul Valery, believe that, "nous entrons dans l’avenir à reculons", looking at the trends and prospective of a field of law (or even a simple legal phenomenon) means looking at its origins. In other words, we can only attempt to divine the future by contemplating and...

Black & Gilson (1998) argued that an IPO-welcoming stock market stimulates venture deals by enabling VCs to give founders a valuable “call option on control”. We study 18,000 startups to investigate the value of this option. Among firms that IPO, 60% of founders are no longer CEO. With...

Outside directors have incentives to resign to protect their reputation or to avoid an increase in their workload when they anticipate that the firm on whose board they sit will perform poorly or disclose adverse news. We call these incentives the dark side of outside directors. We find strong...

Distressed firms with publicly issued bonds often seek to restructure the bonds' payment terms to better reflect the firm's weakened repayment capabilities and thereby avoid a bankruptcy. But Depression-era securities law bars the bondholders from agreeing via a binding out-of-bankruptcy vote to...

Nobel Laureate in Economics for 2016, Oliver Hart, and economist Luigi Zingales recently published an article justifying companies' pursuit of social objectives at the expense of profits from within the shareholder primacy framework. This Essay highlights an important consequence of this...

There is a dearth of British tech-companies listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), and the LSE lacks a large, innovative tech-company such as Google. The UK-Government, concerned as to the loss of UK tech-companies to foreign acquirors, views the encouragement of UK tech-firm listings as a...

Does the structure of corporate boards affect bondholder agency risk? Using mandatory board reforms, I show that firms that transition to independent boards experience economically significant reductions in payout, financing, and event risk covenants in their bond contracts. This effect is not...

Minority shareholders tend not to participate in the decision-making process of public companies with a controlling shareholder, and their voice is rarely heard. Even when they disagree with how the company is being managed, they prefer to express this dissatisfaction by selling their shares...

The internet has created challenges for regulators of financial markets unimagined over eighty years ago by drafters of the Securities and Exchange Acts. The recent explosion in internet use has provided many benefits for investors and publicly-traded companies. The Internet has been a boon to...

Studies of management's disregard of the will of the shareholders have focused on combinations of entrenchment mechanisms and special governance structures. However, management's power to issue stock, a fundamental element of the ability of management to control the corporation regardless of the...