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The Law And Practice Of Shareholder Inspection Rights: A Comparative Analysis Of China And The United States, Robin H. Huang, Randall S. Thomas
The Law And Practice Of Shareholder Inspection Rights: A Comparative Analysis Of China And The United States, Robin H. Huang, Randall S. Thomas
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
Shareholder inspection rights allow a shareholder to access the relevant documents of the company in which they hold an interest, so as to address the problem of information asymmetry and reduce the agency costs inherent in the corporate structure. While Chinese corporate governance and American corporate governance face different sets of agency cost problems, this Article shows that shareholder inspection rights play an important role in both China and the United States. On the books, while shareholder inspection rights in both countries are broadly similar, there are some important differences on issues such as the proper purpose requirement. The empirical …
Agreement In Principle: A Compromise For Activist Shareholders From The Uk Stewardship Code, David W. Roberts
Agreement In Principle: A Compromise For Activist Shareholders From The Uk Stewardship Code, David W. Roberts
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
Equity ownership in the United States and Europe is now highly concentrated in the hands of institutional investors, which gives rise to new problems of agency and corporate governance. These large investment intermediaries, such as mutual funds, specialize in maximizing beneficial owner value based on short-term performance benchmarks but lack the expertise and incentive to actively engage corporate boards on business strategy and governance matters. Instead, institutional investors are "rationally reticent," meaning that they are willing to respond to governance proposals but not to propose them. Activist shareholders may offer an endogenous solution to address "latent activism" in institutional intermediaries …
Common Agency And The Public Corporation, Paul Rose
Common Agency And The Public Corporation, Paul Rose
Vanderbilt Law Review
Under the standard agency theory applied to corporate governance, active monitoring of manager-agents by empowered shareholder-principals will reduce agency costs created by management shirking and expropriation of private benefits. But while shareholder power may result in reduced managerial expropriation, an analysis of how that power is often exercised in public corporation governance reveals that it can also produce significant costs: influential shareholders may extract private benefits from the corporation, incur and impose lobbying expenses, and pressure corporations to adopt inapt corporate governance structures. These costs strain the simple principal-agent model on which shareholder empowerment is based. This Article offers an …