Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

Corporate Crime And Punishment: An Empirical Study, Dorothy S. Lund, Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

For many years, law and economics scholars, as well as politicians and regulators, have debated whether corporate criminal enforcement overdeters beneficial corporate activity or in the alternative, lets corporate criminals off too easily. This debate has recently expanded in its polarization: On the one hand, academics, judges, and politicians have excoriated enforcement agencies for failing to send guilty bankers to jail in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; on the other, the U.S. Department of Justice has since relaxed policies that encouraged individual prosecutions and reduced the size of fines and number of prosecutions. A crucial and yet understudied …

The Overstated Promise Of Corporate Governance, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Review of Jonathan Macey, Corporate Governance: Promises Kept, Promises Broken (Princeton, 2008)

Does Analyst Independence Sell Investors Short?, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Regulators responded to the analyst scandals of the late 1990s by imposing extensive new rules on the research industry. These rules include a requirement forcing financial firms to separate investment banking operations from research. Regulators argued, with questionable empirical support, that the reforms were necessary to eliminate analyst conflicts of interest and ensure the integrity of sell-side research.

By eliminating investment banking revenues as a source for funding research, the reforms have had substantial effects. Research coverage of small issuers has been dramatically reduced—the vast majority of small capitalization firms now have no coverage at all. The market for research …

Hedge Funds And Governance Targets, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

Corporate governance interventions by hedge fund shareholders are triggering debates between advocates of management empowerment and advocates of aggressive monitoring by actors in the capital markets. This Article intervenes with an empirical question: What, based on the record so far, have the hedge funds actually done to their targets? Information has been collected on 130 domestic firms identified in the business press since 2002 as targets of activist hedge funds, including the funds’ demands, their tactics, and the results of their interventions for the targets’ governance and finance. The survey results show that the hedge funds have an enviable record …

Pari Passu And A Distressed Sovereign's Rational Choices, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Sovereign Debt Reform And The Interest Of Creditors, William W. Bratton, G. Mitu Gulati

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Vultures Or Vanguards?: The Role Of Litigation In Sovereign Debt Restructuring, Jill E. Fisch, Caroline M. Gentile

All Faculty Scholarship

The market for sovereign debt differs from the market for corporate debt in several important ways including the risk of opportunistic default by sovereign debtors, the importance of political pressures, and the presence of international development organizations. Moreover, countries are subject to neither liquidation nor standardized processes of debt reorganization. Instead, negotiations between a sovereign debtor and its creditors lead to a voluntary restructuring of the sovereign's debt. One of the greatest difficulties in restructuring claims against sovereign debtors is balancing the interests of the majority of the creditors with those of minority creditors. Holdout creditors serve as a check …

Rules, Principles, And The Accounting Crisis In The United States, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Securities Exchange Commission move too quickly ·when they prod the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the standard setter for US GAAP, to move immediately to a principles-based system. Priorities respecting reform of corporate reporting in the US need to be ordered more carefully. Incentive problems impairing audit performance should be solved first through institutional reform insulating the audit from the negative impact of rent-seeking and solving adverse selection problems otherwise affecting audit practice. So long as auditor independence and management incentives respecting accounting treatments remain suspect. the US reporting system holds out no actor plausibly positioned …

Gaming Delaware, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Racial Dimensions Of Credit And Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Corporate Finance, Corporate Law And Finance Theory, Peter H. Huang, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Scope Of Private Securities Litigation: In Search Of Liability Standards For Secondary Defendants, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Recent federal court decisions have struggled to apply the Supreme Court's decision in Central Bank v. First Interstate to determine when outside professionals should be held liable as primary violators under section IO(b) of the Securities Exchange Act. In keeping with the Court's current interpretive methodology, Central Bank and its progeny employ a textualist approach. In this Article, Professor Fisch argues that literal textualism is an inappropriate approach for interpreting the federal securities laws generally and misguided in light of legislative developments post-dating the Central Bank decision. Instead, Professor Fisch advocates an approach that weighs Congress 's recent endorsement of …