Sky Blog
One distinctive feature of the U.S. economy over recent decades has been the rise of the entrepreneur-dominated public company. This development has derived largely from the growth of private funding available through venture capital, so that initial public offerings have …
I teach a course on “Financial Crises/Regulatory Responses” with the economist Patrick Bolton. This course addresses the struggle to establish and maintain financial stability, an apex goal of the financial system. Last week, I told the students that by the …
Perhaps the most important current development in corporate governance is the growing divide between the United States and the European Union on core questions of fiduciary duty when it comes to ESG. I want to describe this growing divide, to …
The best way out of the bank stability problem revealed by the run on Silicon Valley Bank – but spreading to other banks – may be a new style of prime money market fund (“MMF”) that, unlike existing prime MMFs, …
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank to find a buyer opens up the possibility (and the need) for a new kind of bank that is focused on financial stability as well as the traditional banking functions of lending and running …
Last February, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed to “modernize” the reporting of beneficial ownership of a company’s stock under section 13(d) of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. As I explained in a recent comment letter to the SEC, the …
Let’s be clear about this: The Twitter board was under no legal compulsion to accept Elon Musk’s offer for the company and, from a corporate governance structural point of view, was in an unassailable position until the 2024 shareholders meeting. …
I appreciate the engagement by long-term pill observer Eric Robinson with my Corporate Vote Suppression piece. I am also glad that he agrees that the pill in The Williams Companies Shareholder Litigation ought to be struck down, though he narrowly …
The Delaware Supreme Court has before it a case that could dramatically reshape corporate governance in the United States. The case, The Williams Companies Stockholder Litigation, addresses the legitimacy of an “anti-activist pill” whose particularly aggressive features would severely …
This post responds to the paper, Exit vs. Voice, by Eleonora Broccardo, Oliver Hart, and Luigi Zingales (BHZ),[1] a deep engagement with the choice between alternative means by which an “altruistic” investor can influence corporate behavior. An “altruistic” investor …
The rise and fall of The We Company IPO bubble is one of those events that, like the subprime mortgage bubble that preceded the financial crisis, calls for an examination of market structures that could have produced such a precipitous …
The question that emerges from proposals to elevate a corporation’s “purpose,”[1] the call for co-determination in Senator Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act and now the Business Roundtable’s purported elevation of stakeholder interests, is whether corporate governance is capable of …
EU financial policymakers appear to be once more in a deadlock situation over proposals to limit the sovereign risk exposure of European banks. The strong exposure of some banks in the southern European periphery in their national sovereign’s debt was …
The “meh” economy that accounts for some of the sourness in the American electorate is partly due to a design flaw in the US corporate governance system. One proffered diagnosis is that companies invest for the short term and are …
A recent news story gives us a sobering anecdote about the Greek crisis: a merchant who must conduct all his business in cash because he can neither receive credit card payments nor pay vendors with electronic transfers. This means that …
The best part of a Delaware Chancery Court opinion is the first 30 or so pages. In most important cases, the opinion typically starts by telling a story – a detailed account of the people who figure in the dispute, …
The Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) just enacted by the European Parliament will fail in its essential mission of managing the failure of a systemically important bank in a way that overcomes the fatal link between sovereigns and their banks. The …
The current proposals to accelerate the timing of beneficial ownership disclosure under Section 13(d) of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act and to broaden the definition of beneficial ownership to include derivative positions that provide economic exposure to stock price movement …
Equity ownership in the United States no longer reflects the dispersed share ownership of the canonical Berle-Means firm. Instead, in our new working paper, The Agency Costs of Agency Capital: Activist Investors and the Revaluation of Governance Rights, Ron …