The Enron case challenges some of the core beliefs and practices that have underpinned various positions in the debates about corporate law and governance, including mergers and acquisitions, since the 1980s. In particular, Enron raises at least the following problems for the received model of...

In our sample of 305 cash tender offers occurring between 1993 and 1998, we find evidence that the options market has become the preferred trading venue for informed traders. Given this result, we analyze individual call option contracts for those tender offer targets with traded options,...

This chapter reviews the empirical literature, especially the event study literature, as it relates to corporate and securities law. Event studies are among the most successful uses of econometrics in policy analysis. By providing an anchor for measuring the impact of events on investor wealth,...

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these accruals do not appear to benefit managers and...

The bankruptcy system plays an important role in resolving financial distress and reallocating resources in the economy. While many believe that transparency is central to an efficient bankruptcy system, the Bankruptcy Code lacks clear standards for disclosure and financial reporting. In this...

We find that investors responded positively to a mandated gender quota in Korea, which requires large public firms to include at least one female director on their boards. Investor responses were more positive for firms with high risk, weak corporate governance, and poor social performance,...

Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric information about the value of the offered shares makes it...

This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced—or has failed to influence—federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH has...