The charters for Boeing and Google, two of the largest corporations in history, run just seven and eleven pages long, respectively. These charters say almost nothing about the nature of the company’s business and do not contain policies on business …

Given their importance to corporate governance and often impressive credentials and experience, , many directors are “busy,” meaning they hold concurrent board appointments across multiple firms. These so-called “interlocks” between companies are a growing phenomenon, but not a new one. …

The digital economy has put antitrust regulation in the spotlight, with increasingly dominant technology companies – such as Amazon, Google, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Microsoft – reviving concerns about private monopolies reminiscent of Standard Oil and AT&T. Yet the enforcement …

Dual-class companies – companies with two or more classes of common stock that differ in voting rights – are as popular as they are controversial. Among the dual class ranks are technology companies Facebook (Meta) and Google (Alphabet), food and …

Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Each of these firms was founded more than 20 years ago: Apple and Microsoft in the 1970s, Google and Amazon in the 1990s, and …

In the late 2000s, eight prominent tech firms – including Google, Apple, Intuit, and LucasFilms – were accused of enforcing anti-poaching agreements that stifled worker mobility. The seven publicly listed firms in the group shared a number of directors, and …

Patent thickets are dense webs of overlapping intellectual property rights. They are common in industries ranging from semiconductors to smartphones to pharmaceuticals.  When many firms own the underlying patents, thickets complicate licensing negotiations and increase the risk of holdup and …

Is big business ungovernable? Some of today’s calls to break up and intensely regulate big business do not hinge on harms to consumers as consumers, but rather on the claim that giant corporations with market power treat legal requirements as …

In a new paper, we examine firms’ corporate venture capital (CVC) investing from a disclosure and financial reporting perspective. CVC refers to minority equity investments made by established, publicly-listed firms in privately-held entrepreneurial ventures. CVC investing differs from pure venture …

In a recent study, we examine whether firms structure their mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to avoid scrutiny from antitrust regulators as well as whether such deals reduce product market competition.

While M&A deals are often triggered to create value, they …

Why are venture capitalists the winners in the startup funding game?  VCs have funded most of the big-name startups that now dominate the NASDAQ and, in a sense, have been the only game in town for high-growth startups needing millions …

Companies with dual class shares have, as the term suggests, two (or more) classes of common stock. One class gives its holders voting power proportionate to their equity shareholdings. The other offers a group of shareholders, normally corporate insiders, weighted …

Republican and Democratic leaders have both called for greater scrutiny of the power and influence of Big Tech firms, but, unsurprisingly, they have disagreed about how to address the problem.  Senator Elizabeth Warren and many other leading Democrats have called …