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Full-Text Articles in Law
Private Ordering And The Proxy Access Debate, Scott Hirst, Lucian A. Bebchuk
Private Ordering And The Proxy Access Debate, Scott Hirst, Lucian A. Bebchuk
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines two “meta” issues raised by opponents of the SEC’s proposal to provide shareholders with rights to place director candidates on the company’s proxy materials. First, opponents argue that, even assuming proxy access is desirable in many circumstances, the existing no-access default should be retained and the adoption of proxy access arrangements should be left to opting out of this default on a company-by-company basis. This Article, however, identifies strong reasons against retaining no-access as the default. There is substantial empirical evidence indicating that director insulation from removal is associated with lower firm value and worse performance. Furthermore, …
Corporate Boards Of Directors: Advisors Or Supervisors, Tamar Frankel
Corporate Boards Of Directors: Advisors Or Supervisors, Tamar Frankel
Faculty Scholarship
What makes for a well-functioning corporate board? In this Article I argue that one important condition is that board members must understand and agree upon the group's objectives and its roles. If a corporate board of directors (Board) does not agree on what it is supposed to do; or, worse still, if Board members disagree about the Board's mission and its implementation, then the Board is likely to become dysfunctional-inefficient and ineffective. The Board's missions, however, may be mixed and their forms of implementation may conflict. In this case, the balance between the two missions must be established, and it …
What Default Rules Teach Us About Corporations; What Understanding Corporations Teaches Us About Default Rules, Tamar Frankel
What Default Rules Teach Us About Corporations; What Understanding Corporations Teaches Us About Default Rules, Tamar Frankel
Faculty Scholarship
This Article addresses corporate law's default rules, which allow corporations to waive their directors' liability for damages based on a breach of their fiduciary duty of care. Most large publicly held corporations have adopted such a waiver in their articles of association. This Article suggests that courts should limit the range of the waivers to the circumstances that existed when the voters voted and to the information they received before they voted. This Article distinguishes between public contracts (legislation) and private contracts (commercial transactions) and the default rules that apply to each. The Article shows that courts view corporations and …
Why The Board Is Broken, Tamar Frankel, Joseph Anton
Why The Board Is Broken, Tamar Frankel, Joseph Anton
Faculty Scholarship
Boards of Directors are anachronistic to major companies in the 21st century. Boards had their origin in an era when oversight was easily executed. Corporate directors were controlling shareholders or their nominees. As companies became truly public, directors were nominated by the chief operating officers and served as their advisers. Large companies needed the resources of outsiders to lend their collective genius in an era when outside knowledge, data, and experience were expensive to collect. But as businesses grew larger, the Board's responsibility as representative of the shareholders' interests became more important as well. To advise and supervise enormous …
Managerial Power And Rent Extraction In The Design Of Executive Compensation, David I. Walker
Managerial Power And Rent Extraction In The Design Of Executive Compensation, David I. Walker
Faculty Scholarship
This paper develops an account of the role and significance of managerial power and rent extraction inexecutive compensation. Under the optimal contracting approach to executive compensation, which has dominated academic research on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors that aims to maximize shareholder value. In contrast, the managerial power approach suggests that boards do not operate at arm's length in devising executive compensation arrangements; rather, executives have power to influence their own pay, and they use that power to extract rents. Furthermore, the desire to camouflage rentextraction might lead to the use of inefficient pay …