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The (Misunderstood) Genius Of American Corporate Law, Robert B. Ahdieh
The (Misunderstood) Genius Of American Corporate Law, Robert B. Ahdieh
Faculty Scholarship
In this Reply, I respond to comments by Bill Bratton, Larry Cunningham, and Todd Henderson on my recent paper - Trapped in a Metaphor: The Limited Implications of Federalism for Corporate Governance. I begin by reiterating my basic thesis - that state competition should be understood to have little consequence for corporate governance, if (as charter competition's advocates assume) capital-market-driven managerial competition is also at work. I then consider some of the thoughtful critiques of this claim, before suggesting ways in which the comments highlight just the kind of comparative institutional analysis my paper counsels. Rather than a stark choice …
Trapped In A Metaphor: The Limited Implications Of Federalism For Corporate Governance, Robert B. Ahdieh
Trapped In A Metaphor: The Limited Implications Of Federalism For Corporate Governance, Robert B. Ahdieh
Faculty Scholarship
Trapped in a metaphor articulated at the founding of modern corporate law, the study of corporate governance has - for some thirty years - been asking the wrong questions. Rather than a singular race among states, whether to the bottom or the top, the synthesis of William Cary and Ralph Winter’s famous exchange is better understood as two competitions, each serving distinct normative ends. Managerial competition advances the project that has motivated corporate law since Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means - effective regulation of the separation of ownership and control. State competition, by contrast, does not promote a race to …
Those Who Forget The Regulatory Successes Of The Past Are Condemned To Failure, William K. Black
Those Who Forget The Regulatory Successes Of The Past Are Condemned To Failure, William K. Black
Faculty Works
This paper shows that the reregulation of the savings & loan (S&L) industry was successful because the regulators correctly identified the primary cause of the second phase of the debacle as an epidemic of “accounting control fraud” and took effective measures to contain such frauds. Control frauds occur when the persons controlling a seemingly legitimate organization use it as a “weapon” to defraud. In the financial sector, accounting control fraud is the “weapon of choice.” The regulators’ primary insights were (1) that lenders optimize accounting fraud by engaging in a distinctive operational pattern that would be irrational for any honest …