Corporate Groups
Working Paper
The State as Owner - China's Experience
This essay explores China’s experience with state ownership of business enterprise. After a short historical survey of the rise, fall, and re-emergence of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) as a form of business organization, the essay describes...Read more
The End of the Corporation
We are witnessing a quiet but quick transformation of corporate governance. The rise of digital technologies and social media are forcing companies to reconsider how they organize themselves and structure firm governance.
What is...Read more
Equity Issuance Methods and Dilution
We analyze rights offerings and public offerings in a setting where better informed current shareholders strategically choose to subscribe. When all current shareholders have wealth to participate, rights offerings achieve the full information...Read more
Implicit Communication and Enforcement of Corporate Disclosure Regulation
This study examines the challenge of implicit communication -- qualitative statements, tone, and non-verbal cues -- to the effectiveness of enforcing corporate disclosure regulation. We use a Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) setting, given...Read more
The Politics of CEOs
This article studies the political preferences of chief executive officers (CEOs) of public companies. We use Federal Election Commission records to compile a comprehensive database of the political contributions made by more than 3800...Read more
Long-Term Bias
An emerging consensus in certain legal, business, and scholarly communities maintains that corporate managers are pressured unduly into chasing short-term gains at the expense of superior long-term prospects. The forces inducing managerial myopia...Read more
Which Related Party Transactions Should Be Subject to Ex Ante Review? Evidence from Germany
The amended EU shareholder rights directive introduces a comprehensive regime of ex ante review for potentially conflicted transactions between listed companies and their major shareholders, downstream entities, and managers. Such ‘related party...Read more
Bringing the AGM to the 21st Century: Blockchain and Smart Contracting Tech for Shareholder Involvement
The AGM is often considered to play an important role in direct shareholder monitoring of directors and corporate blockholders. However, its practical functioning suffers from large obstacles.
In this research we outline the AGM’s flaws...Read more
The Great Pyramids of America: A Revised History of US Business Groups, Corporate Ownership and Regulation, 1930-1950
Most listed firms are freestanding in the U.S, while listed firms in other countries often belong to business groups: lasting structures in which listed firms control other listed firms. Hand-collected historical data illuminate how the present...Read more
Groups of Companies - A Comparative Study on the Economics, Law and Regulation of Corporate Groups
The phenomenon of groups of companies is very common in modern corporate reality. The empirical data on groups of companies are heterogeneous because they are collected for very different regulatory and other objectives. Two main agency problems...Read more
Related Party Transactions: Policy Options and Real-World Challenges (With a Critique of the European Commission Proposal)
This paper provides a legal and policy analysis of transactions between a corporation and one of its ?related parties.? It first highlights the reasons why related party transactions (?RPTs?) are so common around the world. Next, it better...Read more