Sky Blog
The hedge fund industry in the United States has evolved from a niche market participant in the early 1950s to a major industry operating in international financial markets today. Hedge funds in the United States were originally privately-held, privately-managed investment …
In the paper “Intrapreneurship,” recently made available on SSRN, I turn my focus from startups/entrepreneurship to innovation inside large corporations, or intrapreneurship. I examine both traditional intrapreneurship, or innovation taking place inside large corporations, and corporate venture capital, where …
Amid much fanfare, Square Inc. went public in an IPO at the New York Stock Exchange on November 19, 2015. Founded in San Francisco by, among others, Jack Dorsey who still runs the company to this day, the company has …
In an earlier blog post, I argued that a combination of contractual rights and non-legal factors balances the interests of the controlling insiders and outside investors in publicly-traded limited liability companies (LLCs). Since most of these non-legal factors—the firm’s …
Private equity is often seen as an agent of creative destruction, helping resources to be reallocated to more productive uses. Private equity firms help improve the financial performance and operational efficiency of the companies they acquire, and plenty of academic …
The sharp increase in mergers and acquisitions litigation has generated widespread skepticism about the utility of such cases and, along with it, skepticism about the role played by the plaintiffs’ law firms that bring them. Deal suits are broadly perceived …
In 2003 Carnival merged with Princess Cruises to form the largest cruise ship company in the world, now known as Carnival Corp. & PLC. Prior to the merger, Carnival was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Princess was …
The pending mergers of Johnson Controls, Inc. with Tyco International plc and Pfizer Inc. with Allergan plc means the value of inversions in the pipeline ($185B) has nearly reached the total value of all inversions completed between January 1, 2010 …
In order to ensure that victims of business-related human rights and gross environmental abuses in countries that host transnational business (host countries) are able to have the ability to seek and obtaining a remedy for their harm, courts should ignore …
A January 2016 study, Short-Term Investors, Long-Term Investments, and Firm Value, by Martijn Cremers, Ankur Pareek and Zacharias Sautner, provides substantial “empirical” evidence for the fact that, in the current corporate governance environment, short-term investors possess the undue …
On January 22, 2016, Chancellor Andre Bouchard of the Delaware Court of Chancery issued an important decision in In re Trulia, Inc. Stockholder Litigation—likely hammering the final nail in the coffin of “disclosure-only” settlements with broad releases of liability …
On January 21, 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the latest annual revision to the size thresholds governing premerger notification requirements under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976, as amended, Section 7A of the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. …
Merger agreements and other complex contracts often contain “anti-reliance” provisions reciting that the representations in the agreement are the sole representations on which the parties relied in entering into the contract. The law regarding the interpretation and enforceability of such …
The message of the Dow/DuPont merger and split up is simple: No firm is today “too big to target.” Activists can see the transaction as evidence that, even in the rare case where they lose a proxy fight (as they …
Ethan Allen and its management prevailed a few weeks ago against an intense hedge fund activist campaign to remove its entire board of directors.
An analyst of one of our larger shareholders, the Gabelli funds, observed “I’ve never seen a …
Recent econometric studies (“empirical evidence”) definitively rebut the position taken by the Harvard Law School Shareholder Rights Project (SRP) that classified boards are associated with lower firm value and inferior outcomes for shareholders. After correcting serious statistical and econometrical flaws…
On December 10th, Columbia Law School’s Millstein Center on Global Markets and Corporate Ownership will be hosting its 10th annual Millstein Governance Forum.
For the past decade, the Forum has served as one of the premiere …
To begin with a tautology, when you buy a company, you buy their data—and the attendant risks to that data. Cybersecurity risks are not limited to consumer-facing businesses, whose recent losses of cardholder or patient data grab news headlines. Indeed, …
The Delaware Court of Chancery has been on a slow but clear path toward increased reliance on the merger price in determining fair value in appraisal cases. While the court’s reliance on the merger price as the best indicator of …