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Full-Text Articles in Law
Predicting Corporate Governance Risk: Evidence From The Directors' & Officers' Liability Insurance Market, Tom Baker, Sean J. Griffith
Predicting Corporate Governance Risk: Evidence From The Directors' & Officers' Liability Insurance Market, Tom Baker, Sean J. Griffith
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines how liability insurers transmit and transform the content of corporate and securities law. Directors' & Officers' (D&O) liability insurers are the financiers of shareholder litigation in the American legal system, paying on behalf of the corporation and its directors and officers when shareholders sue. The ability of the law to deter corporate actors thus depends upon the insurance intermediary. How, then, do insurers transmit and transform the content of corporate and securities law in underwriting D& 0 coverage?In this Article, we report the results of an empirical study of the D&O underwriting process. Drawing upon in-depth interviews …
The Missing Monitor In Corporate Governance: The Directors' & Officers' Liability Insurer, Tom Baker, Sean J. Griffith
The Missing Monitor In Corporate Governance: The Directors' & Officers' Liability Insurer, Tom Baker, Sean J. Griffith
Faculty Scholarship
This article reports the results of empirical research on the monitoring role of directors' and officers' liability insurance (D&O insurance) companies in American corporate governance. Economic theory provides three reasons to expect D&O insurers to serve as corporate governance monitors: first, monitoring provides insurers with a way to manage moral hazard; second, monitoring provides benefits to shareholders who might not otherwise need the risk distribution that D&O insurance provides; and third, the "bonding" provided by risk distribution gives insurers a comparative advantage in monitoring. Nevertheless, we find that D&O insurers neither monitor corporate governance during the life of the insurance …