Law Commons^™

Private Equity Investments In Microfinance In India, Hugh Manahan

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

A trail connects a skyscraper in Manhattan’s Financial District to a tiny food stand in a village in the southeast Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Initially wild and overgrown, the trail now resembles a well-developed road, cleared and shaped. The trail does not connect customers to call centers or raw materials to laborers; the path connects lenders seeking abnormal returns on their investments to borrowers living in poverty. This is the path of private equity investments in microfinance. Microfinance is a powerful financial innovation that has changed personal finance in many parts of the world. While microfinance began as non-profit …

Trust And Control: The Value Effect Of Venture Capital Term Sheet Provisions As Risk Allocation Tools, Jason M. Gordon, David Orozco

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

The parties to a venture funding agreement are in a state of coopetition. The parties account for perceived risk in the entrepreneur-investor relationship through varying levels of control demanded from and trust afforded to the other party. The level of risk perceived by each party may differ along individual aspects of the prospective equity deal. The provisions of the term sheet delineate the subjective risk perceptions of each party to the transaction by allocating control or trusting a party with decision-making rights. When negotiating term sheet provisions, a party should seek to understand and recognize the risk perceived by the …

Dispersed Ownership: The Theories, The Evidence, And The Enduring Tension Between "Lumpers" And "Splitters", John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that dispersed ownership resulted less from inexorable forces and more from private ordering. Neither legal nor political conditions mandated or prevented the appearance of dispersed ownership. Rather, entrepreneurs, investment bankers, and investors — all seeking to maximize value — sometimes saw reasons why selling control into the public market would maximize value for them. But when and why? That is the article's focus. It argues that law played less of a role than specialized intermediaries — investment banks, securities exchanges, and other agents — who found it to be in their self-interest to foster dispersed ownership and …

Regulation A: Small Businesses’ Search For “A Moderate Capital”, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Small businesses are an important part of our national economy, accounting for as much as 40% of our total economic activity and providing society with important services and products.

Small businesses face daunting economic, structural, and legal impediments when they attempt to acquire external capital. The absence of financial inter-mediation services means that they are almost always on their own to find investors. Their small capital needs mean that their relative offering costs are often sky high. Federal and state securities rules significantly exacerbate these economic and structural disadvantages by imposing onerous and unwarranted conditions on their search for external …