Pragmatic and effective research on corporate governance often turns critically on appreciating the legal institutions surrounding corporate entities – yet such nuances are often unfamiliar or poorly specified to economists and other social scientists without legal training. This chapter...

The capacity for crisis perception and to foresee risk is central to project management where responsibility for safety is a central component informing decision making. This article examines the absence of this capacity as a cause and consequence of corporate governance failure. The example of...

Pragmatic and effective research on corporate governance often turns critically on appreciating the legal institutions surrounding corporate entities—yet such nuances are often unfamiliar or poorly specified to economists and other social scientists without legal training. This chapter...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions in correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience...

This paper examines Delaware's judicial treatment of deal protection measures, particularly termination fee provisions. The paper explores the tension between the economic function of these provisions in inducing bidders and potentially compensating them for opportunity and transaction costs in...

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...

M&A transactions are governed by contracts that exhibit constrained variation – they are negotiated, yet full of boilerplate, tailored, yet full of patterns and regularities. This paper (a chapter of the Research Handbook on Mergers and Acquisitions, forthcoming) reviews the suite of contracts...

A storm is brewing on the corporate law horizon. Several recent judicial developments, which this Article ties together for the first time, present the most refined opportunity yet for mandatory arbitration—today prevalent in consumer and employment contracts—to enter the corporate law...

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...