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Full-Text Articles in Law
Index Funds And The Future Of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, And Policy, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk
Index Funds And The Future Of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, And Policy, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk
Faculty Scholarship
Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor, vote, and engage with their portfolio companies—can be expected to have a profound impact on the governance and performance of public companies and the economy. Understanding index fund stewardship, and how policymaking can improve it, is thus critical for corporate law scholarship. In this Article we contribute to such understanding by providing a comprehensive theoretical, empirical, and policy analysis of index fund stewardship.
We begin by putting forward an agency-costs theory of index fund incentives. Stewardship decisions by index funds …
The Specter Of The Giant Three, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk
The Specter Of The Giant Three, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will come to be dominated by the future “Giant Three.”
We begin by analyzing the drivers of the rise of the Big Three, including the structural factors that are leading to the heavy concentration of the index funds sector. We then provide empirical evidence about the past growth and current status of the …
Corporate Governance By Index Exclusion, Scott Hirst, Kobi Kastiel
Corporate Governance By Index Exclusion, Scott Hirst, Kobi Kastiel
Faculty Scholarship
Investors have long been unhappy with certain governance arrangements adopted by companies undertaking initial public offerings, such as dual-class voting structures. Traditional sources of corporate governance rules—the Securities and Exchange Commission, state law, and exchange listing rules—do not constrain these arrangements. As a result, investors have turned to a new source of governance rules: index providers.
This Article provides a comprehensive analysis of index exclusion rules and their likely effects on insiders’ decision-making. We show that efforts to portray index providers as the new sheriffs of the U.S. capital markets are overstated. Index providers face complex and conflicting interests, which …