Securities Law Commons^™

Hidden Agendas In Shareholder Voting, Scott Hirst, Adriana Z. Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Nothing in either corporate or securities law requires companies to notify investors what they will be voting on before the record date for a shareholder meeting. We show that, overwhelmingly, they do not. The result is “hidden agendas”: for 88% of shareholder votes, investors cannot find out what they will be voting on before the record date. This poses an especially serious problem for investors who engage in securities lending: they must decide whether the expected benefit of voting exceeds the expected benefit of continuing to lend their shares (or making them available for lending) without knowing what they will …

Securitizing Notes Of Small Businesses And Needy Workers, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

Businesses, whether large ones or small ones, such as restaurants and small shops, are presently closed and some of their employees have been laid off.¹ Currently, the government is lending money to these small businesses² and the now unemployed workers for their sustenance. It then collects the payments from some of the borrowers and the source of the rest of the money is taxes.³ Since not all, or perhaps only a few, small businesses own real estate, they might sign notes promising to repay the loans but can offer no asset backing. Presumably, the nation’s financial deficit …

Index Funds And The Future Of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, And Policy, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk

Faculty Scholarship

Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor, vote, and engage with their portfolio companies—can be expected to have a profound impact on the governance and performance of public companies and the economy. Understanding index fund stewardship, and how policymaking can improve it, is thus critical for corporate law scholarship. In this Article we contribute to such understanding by providing a comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and policy analysis of index fund stewardship.

We begin by putting forward an agency-costs theory of index fund incentives. Stewardship decisions by index funds …

The Specter Of The Giant Three, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will come to be dominated by the future “Giant Three.”

We begin by analyzing the drivers of the rise of the Big Three, including the structural factors that are leading to the heavy concentration of the index funds sector. We then provide empirical evidence about the past growth and current status of the …

Zappers, Phantomware And Other Sales Suppression Software In The State Of Washington, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Robert Chicoine

Faculty Scholarship

Electronic sales suppression (ESS) is a fraud that has been a (prominent) feature of the North American retail business since at least 1996. The first EES case in the US dates from 1981. ESS is a global problem. Depending on the jurisdiction, and the research study consulted, ESS is estimated to be present in 34% (of Canadian), 50% (of German – two studies), and 70% (of Swedish and Slovenian) businesses. It may be the case today, that “you cannot leave home without” encountering (or participating in) ESS.

The most common types of sales suppression technology are Zappers and Phantomware programming. …

Lead Plaintiffs And Lead Counsel In Deal Litigation, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

The shareholder lawsuit is the primary vehicle for enforcing corporate law. While closely related fields like securities regulation rely on private shareholder lawsuits to supplement the enforcement work of public regulators like the Securities Exchange Commission, corporate law enforcement depends largely on private rights of action brought by aggrieved investors and their lawyers. The purpose of these lawsuits is straightforward: to induce corporate fiduciaries like boards and managers to abide by the duties of loyalty and care in overseeing the corporation. There are many situations that implicate these fiduciary duties, but none that are as fraught with conflict and temptation …

Upper-Level Courses: Three Examplars, Mark Fagan, Tamar Frankel, Eric J. Gouvin, Kathy Z. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

I'm Mark Fagan, and I co-teach a course on securitization with Tamar Frankel at Boston University School of Law. We have come together to teach several interdisciplinary courses that combine law, business and public policy. Our course on securitization is a wonderful exemplar because it touches so many aspects of law as well as business and public policy.

We spent quite a bit of time wrestling with how to teach it. Do you teach it in a process fashion? Do you teach it by legal topic? Do you take examples and examine them? After much debate and discussion, we actually …