New leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is making it a priority to reverse the decline in the number of U.S public companies. Its method: reversing regulatory creep and reducing the onerous burdens of compliance that deter all …

The successful takeover bid by Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) for Mediobanca is a landmark event in Italian corporate history. While offering lessons for corporate governance in Delaware and the U.S. generally, it sheds new light on an old …

Shareholders and investor advocacy groups have long criticized executives for being paid top dollar while achieving subpar returns for shareholders. In response, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which has two, related provisions that …

Corporate governance research has historically focused on agency costs (imposed by professional managers) or principal-principal expropriation (imposed by dominant shareholders). We seek to reverse this theoretical focus on private benefits of control, and its preoccupation with the principal/shareholder and agent/manager …

In today’s rapidly evolving corporate landscape, the composition of boards is not just a matter of compliance or social responsibility; it’s a strategic imperative that shapes the future of firms. Amidst growing public scrutiny and socio-economic shifts, particularly following the …

In a new paper, we examine the differences between private and public firms to see whether one outshines the other when it comes to investment efficiency. Our analysis begins with three theories.

The Agency Theory: Although going public offers …

Practitioners and academics alike debate best practices in corporate governance, but rarely do companies reveal how they determine what governance practices work best for them. In a new paper, we report the results of interviews on this topic with …

In a new paper, we use agency theory to explore the effect of board independence on dividend policy. Over the past few decades, many studies have incorporated several market imperfections into their model of capital markets, such as transaction costs, …

Public versus  private status is a common point of differentiation among companies and can determine, for example, how they are regulated and who can invest in them. Yet many private companies increasingly resemble their public counterparts. This blurring of the …

What is the right governance framework for a public company? This question sits at the core of decades of empirical and theoretical research, and yet we still lack consensus on an answer. In particular, agency-cost essentialists support governance structures that …

Disclosure by publicly listed companies provides critical information to the capital markets and benefits not only firms’ stakeholders but also the overall economy (e.g., Badertscher et al. 2013; Shroff et al. 2017; Barrios et al. 2021). However, the number of …

Traditionally, high-growth private firms in the United States have used the public equity markets as their primary source of external financing to fund innovation and expansion. For this reason, well-functioning capital markets have been instrumental to the U.S. economy, supporting …

Securities law in the United States has traditionally been designed around a set of lines – the “public–private divide” – which separate public companies, public capital, and public markets from private companies, private capital, and private markets. Until the early …