Sky Blog
In a recent New York Times article, Steven Davidoff Solomon listed several possible explanations for a significant decline in the number of initial public offerings (IPOs). Among the most interesting was that there are many large and successful high-tech …
Technological shocks, import competition, and shifts in regulatory policies lead with increasing frequency to major industry shakeouts and radical change in economic environments. Whether firms succumb or thrive depends on the extent to which they restructure and reinvent their business …
In an article forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review, I analyze the strategic use of insider trading law to disable the trading activity of an information recipient. I call this phenomenon “insider tainting.” While most tips of information open …
On September 21, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued guidance on the implementation of the Pay Ratio disclosure requirement as well as separate guidance from SEC staff concerning the use of sampling and other methodologies. Concurrently, the staff …
Throughout the 1990s, the Big 5 accounting firms made a concerted effort to enter the legal services market. By the close of the twentieth century, legal networks directly owned or closely affiliated with the Big 5 were major players in …
For most of the 20th Century, Eastman Kodak Company (often referred to simply as Kodak) was one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Founded in 1888, Kodak dominated the film and camera markets — in 1976, Kodak …
In a recent article prepared for the ABA’s National Institute on Class Actions, which is now posted on SSRN (available here), I and Professor Alexandra Lahav survey recent class action developments, and I focus particularly on the special …
Global M&A activity declined in August 2017, with total deal volume, as measured by dollar value, decreasing 4.0% to $277.65 billion and the number of deals decreasing 5.6% to 3,119. The U.S. remained a bright spot in the M&A market, …
Over the past few decades, the ownership of public corporations has been turned on its head. While private individuals owned approximately two-thirds of U.S. equities in 1970, today it is institutional investors like Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street that control …
Many institutional investors have made increasing the diversity of corporate boards a priority, yet activist investors that rely on the support of these institutional investors often make boards less diverse. Boards should take advantage of this divergence between the priorities …
As we approach the start of the 2018 proxy season, developments since January 2015 prompt a brief review of the state of play.
The Dodd-Frank Act’s worthy objectives were to improve the safety, resilience, efficiency, and transparency of our financial system. Yet the law has drastically diminished the credit available to low-income Americans – the very people it was supposed to help. Equally …
On July 27 of this year, Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), delivered a speech in which he questioned the sustainability of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) in its current form. The FCA has …
A securities class action is a complex event characterized by scarce information, high uncertainty, and increased information asymmetry between stakeholders and firms. In our paper “The Effect of Investor Attention on Fraud Discovery and Value Loss in Securities Class Action …
Recently, in In re Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. Stockholder Litigation, in an opinion by Vice Chancellor Slights, the Delaware Court of Chancery extended the Kahn v. M&F Worldwide roadmap for invoking business judgment review in controller buyouts to …
There are two starkly different sides to the heated debate over staggered boards. On one are those who argue, based in part on work by Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Alma Cohen, that the staggered board is value decreasing because it …
The Federal Reserve’s proposed supervisory guidance on corporate governance is a breath of fresh air that should encourage banking boards to focus on their core responsibilities and avoid blurring the distinctions between executive and non-executive duties. It is also a …
On 29 August 2017, the UK Government published its response to the green paper on corporate governance reform that it issued at the end of November 2016. It intends to implement its reform proposals — so that they apply to …
A central goal of corporate law is to make managers accountable to shareholders. So it may come as a surprise that America’s federal government frequently compels companies to “effectively exclude the Shareholder from . . . influence over the Corporation’s …
On August 23, 2017, the Second Circuit issued its second significant decision on insider trading liability in the past three years, United States v. Martoma. In its 2014 decision in United States v. Newman, the Second Circuit limited …