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Full-Text Articles in Law
Politics And The Business Corporation, Robert H. Sitkoff
Politics And The Business Corporation, Robert H. Sitkoff
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
This essay explores the policy bases for, and the political economy of, the law's long-standing regulation of corporate political speech. The essay has three parts. First, it contends that the conventional justifications for regulating corporate interventions in politics -- that corporate donations unnaturally skew the political discourse (bad politics) and that corporate political donations harm shareholders (agency costs) -- assume irrational investors and substantial capital market inefficiency. Drawing on public choice theory, the essay also explores the aim of retarding rent-seeking as an alternative justification for regulating corporate interventions in politics. Second, the essay reexamines the history of the regulation …
Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman
Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman
Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers
In this Article, Professor Sharfman addresses the problem of "discretionary valuation": that courts resolve valuation disputes arbitrarily and unpredictably, thus harming litigants and society. As a solution, he proposes the enactment of "valuation averaging," a new procedure for resolving valuation disputes modeled on the algorithmic valuation processes often agreed to by sophisticated private firms in advance of any dispute. He argues that by replacing the discretion of judges and juries with a mechanical valuation process, valuation averaging would cause litigants to introduce more plausible and conciliatory valuations into evidence and thereby reduce the cost of valuation litigation and increase the …
Trust Law, Corporate Law, And Capital Market Efficiency, Robert H. Sitkoff
Trust Law, Corporate Law, And Capital Market Efficiency, Robert H. Sitkoff
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
In both the publicly-traded corporation and the private donative trust a crucial task is to minimize the agency costs that arise from the separation of risk-bearing and management. But where the law of corporate governance evolved in the shadow of capital-market checks on agency costs, trust governance did not. Thus, even more than that of close corporations, the law and study of private trusts offers an illuminating counterfactual -- a control, as it were - for a playful thought experiment about the importance of capital market efficiency to the law and study of public corporations. The animating idea for this …