We examine how legal standards affect outcomes in shareholder lawsuits where the defendants create Special Litigation Committees (SLCs). We compile a hand-collected sample of SLC associated lawsuits spanning a 26-year period from Jan 1, 1990 through Dec 31, 2015. We produce extensive descriptive...

This paper examines an innovative response to the rise of dual-class stock: the use of tenure voting by U.S. public companies. Tenure voting is the award of an additional number of votes to shareholders depending upon the duration of their ownership. Tenure voting has the potential to be a more...

We examine how liquidity and return concerns at large mutual funds explain their diminished participation in small IPOs since the late 1990s. Using 5,825 IPOs and portfolio-level information for 37,052 funds, we exploit Russia's 1998 debt default as an exogenous shock to funds' liquidity...

Throughout the Fall 2007 and into the new year 2008 private equity firms repeatedly attempted to terminate pending acquisitions. The litigation surrounding these purported terminations and heightened scrutiny directed upon the terms of private equity agreements opened a revealing window on a...

Defense litigation counsel are retained by target firm management to defend them in mergers and acquisition (M&A) litigation. We use hand collected data from a ten-year period (2003-2012) to examine whether the choice of defense litigation counsel affects the outcome of M&A litigation and...

Intermediation in private equity involves illiquid investments, professional investors, and high information asymmetry. We use this unique setting to empirically evaluate theoretical predictions regarding intermediation. Placement agent usage has become nearly ubiquitous, but agents are...

Using a hand-collected sample of 1,739 class actions that challenge the fairness of M&A transactions from the period 2003 through 2012, we examine the effectiveness of plaintiffs' law firms. From out of the 336 law firms in our sample, we determine the top law firms based on their popularity...

This study evaluates the relation between hostile takeovers and 17 takeover laws from 1965 to 2014. Using a hand-collected dataset of largely exogenous legal changes we find that certain takeover laws, such as poison pill and business combination laws, have no discernible impact on hostile...

This report provides preliminary statistics for takeover litigation in 2014. Takeover litigation continued at a "steady state" and at an extremely high rate. Lawsuits were brought in 94.9% of takeovers in 2014 versus 39% in 2005. This is the fourth year in a row that the rate of litigation was...