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Securities Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2013

Corporate governance

Faculty Scholarship

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Securities Law

A Private Ordering Solution To Blockholder Disclosure, Joshua Mitts Jan 2013

A Private Ordering Solution To Blockholder Disclosure, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The recent debate over reforming the Securities Exchange Act section 13(d) ten-day filing window demonstrates the importance of balancing the costs and benefits of delayed blockholder disclosure. While hedge fund activism may create shareholder value, short-termism is a very real problem for firms today. Rather than a rigid mandatory rule, the duration of the blockholder disclosure window should be set through a shareholder amendment to the corporate bylaws that empowers shareholders to set an optimal maximum length for each firm. To internalize the economic and moral costs to society of permitting trading on asymmetric information, the SEC should impose a …


Ring-Fencing, Steven L. Schwarcz Jan 2013

Ring-Fencing, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

“Ring-fencing” is often touted as a regulatory solution to problems in banking, finance, public utilities, and insurance. However, both the precise meaning of ring-fencing, as well as the nature of the problems that ring-fencing regulation purports to solve, are ill defined. This article examines the functions and conceptual foundations of ring-fencing. In a regulatory context, the term can best be understood as legally deconstructing a firm in order to more optimally reallocate and reduce risk. So utilized, ring-fencing can help to protect public-benefit activities performed by private-sector firms, as well as to mitigate systemic risk and the too-big-to-fail problem inherent …