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Full-Text Articles in Law
On The Rise Of Shareholder Primacy, Signs Of Its Fall, And The Return Of Managerialism (In The Closet), Lynn Stout
On The Rise Of Shareholder Primacy, Signs Of Its Fall, And The Return Of Managerialism (In The Closet), Lynn Stout
Lynn A. Stout
In their 1932 opus "The Modern Corporation and Public Property," Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means famously documented the evolution of a new economic entity—the public corporation. What made the public corporation “public,” of course, was that it had thousands or even hundreds of thousands of shareholders, none of whom owned more than a small fraction of outstanding shares. As a result, the public firm’s shareholders had little individual incentive to pay close attention to what was going on inside the firm, or even to vote. Dispersed shareholders were rationally apathetic. If they voted at all, they usually voted to approve …
Optimized Theft: Why Some Controlling Shareholders “Generously” Expropriate From Minority Shareholders, Sang Yop Kang
Optimized Theft: Why Some Controlling Shareholders “Generously” Expropriate From Minority Shareholders, Sang Yop Kang
Sang Yop Kang
Although controlling shareholder agency problems have been well studied so far, many questions still remain unanswered. In particular, an important puzzle in a bad-law jurisdiction is: why some controlling shareholders (“roving controllers”) loot the entire corporate assets at once, and why others (“stationary controllers”) siphon a part of corporate assets on a continuous basis. To solve this conundrum, this Article provides analytical frameworks exploring the behaviors and motivations of controlling shareholders. To begin with, I reinterpret Olson’s political theory of “banditry” in the context of corporate governance in developing countries. Based on a new taxonomy of controlling shareholders (“roving controllers” …
Managing Cyberthreat, Lawrence J. Trautman
Managing Cyberthreat, Lawrence J. Trautman
Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.
Cyber security is an important strategic and governance issue. However, because most corporate CEOs and directors have no formal engineering or information technology training, it is understandable that their lack of actual cybersecurity knowledge is problematic. Particularly among smaller companies having limited resources, knowledge regarding what their enterprise should actually be doing about cybersecurity can’t be all that good. My goal in this article is to explore the unusually complex subject of cybersecurity in a highly readable manner. First, an examination of recent threats is provided. Next, governmental policy initiatives are discussed. Third, some basic tools that can be used …
The Institutional Appetite For Quack Corporate Governance, Alicia J. Davis
The Institutional Appetite For Quack Corporate Governance, Alicia J. Davis
Alicia Davis
This Article offers evidence that higher quality internal corporate governance is associated with higher levels of ownership by institutional investors. This finding is consistent with the idea that institutions have greater reason than individual investors to prefer well-governed firms, but surprising given the substantial empirical evidence that casts doubt on the efficacy of internal governance mechanisms. The study described in this Article also finds that higher quality external governance is associated with lower proportions of ownership by certain types of institutional investors, also a somewhat surprising result given available empirical evidence on the positive relationship between external governance and firm …
Re-Envisioning Investors’ Anti-Director Rights Index: Theory, Criticism, And Implications, Sang Yop Kang
Re-Envisioning Investors’ Anti-Director Rights Index: Theory, Criticism, And Implications, Sang Yop Kang
Sang Yop Kang
‘Law and Finance’ theory – which offers analytical frameworks to measure the protection of public investors and the quality of corporate governance – has dominated the comparative corporate governance scholarship in the last decade. So far, many proponents and critics have had debates on the relevance of the theory and the implications of the theory’s empirical studies. Several important points in relation to shareholder protection, however, have been highly neglected in these debates. In particular, the significance of one-share-one-vote (OSOV) rule has been inappropriately underestimated. In response, this Article explores (1) why OSOV is an utmost critical component in corporate …