Law Commons^™

In Praise Of Investor Irrationality, Gregory La Blanc, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

How should a market filled with investors who chronically make bad investments, but is nevertheless efficient, be regulated? A growing body of evidence suggests that this is the state of most securities markets; investors rely on cognitive processes that produce systematically bad choices, and yet the market remains largely efficient. In fact, cognitive errors might be essential to their efficient operation. Even investors who make systematic errors also often possess real and unique information that can contribute to accurate pricing of securities. If such investors became mindful of their limited ability to distinguish between real information and erroneous information, they …

Enforceability Of Mandatory Arbitration Clauses For Shareholder-Corporation Disputes, Garry D. Hartlieb

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Investor litigation is an increasingly vexatious field of law. Nearly every time a significant change of control or corporate ownership occurs, plaintiffs’ attorneys file standardized complaints to set in motion class action suits. Ultimately, the settlements shareholders receive fail to achieve the practical effects that parties on both sides desire. Shareholders may receive pennies on the dollar of what they allege was lost by corporate wrongdoing, and, in some cases, shareholders may not receive monetary recovery as the settlement requires only that the corporation to make changes to its governing documents. These suits distract directors and management from the core …

The Risk Of Money Laundering Through Crowdfunding: A Funding Portal's Guide To Compliance And Crime Fighting, Zachary Robock

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

With the recent passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (“JOBS Act”) and proposed regulations, equity crowdfunding is poised to play an important role in fundraising for many types of emerging growth companies. A fundamental purpose of crowdfunding is to reduce economic barriers to capital markets for emerging growth companies, in part by relaxing rigorous information disclosure requirements currently mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Relaxed regulation should help reduce the cost of fundraising, but it will also present certain risks. Investor fraud is a common concern, which is addressed at length in the JOBS Act and …

The Fragmented Regulation Of Investment Advice: A Call For Harmonization, Christine Lazaro, Benjamin P. Edwards

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Decades of short-term thinking and regulatory fixes created the bewilderingly complex statutory and regulatory structures governing the giving of personalized investment advice to retail customers. Although deeply flawed, the current systems remain entrenched because of the difficulties inherent in making radical alterations. Importantly, the current patchwork systems do not seem to serve retail customers particularly well. Retail customers tend to make predictable and costly mistakes in allocating their assets. Some of this occurs because many investors lack basic financial literacy. A recent study released by the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission”) on financial literacy among investors …

Broker-Dealers And Investment Advisers: A Behaviorial-Economics Analysis Of Competing Suggestions For Reform, Polina Demina

Michigan Law Review

For the average investor trying to save for retirement or a child’s college fund, the world of investing has become increasingly complex. These retail investors must turn more frequently to financial intermediaries, such as broker-dealers and investment advisers, to get sound investment advice. Such intermediaries perform different duties for their clients, however. The investment adviser owes his client a fiduciary duty of care and therefore must provide financial advice that is in the client’s best interests, while the broker-dealer must merely provide advice that is suitable to the client’s interests—a lower standard than the fiduciary duty of care. And yet …

Market Efficiency And The Problem Of Retail Flight, Alicia J. Davis

Articles

In 1950, 91 % of common stock in the U.S. was owned directly by individual inves­ tors. Today, that percentage stands at only 23%. The mass exodus of retail investors and their investment dollars has negative implications not only for capital formation and investor protection, but also for market efficiency. Individual investors are often assumed to be noise traders who distort stock prices and harm market functioning. Therefore, some argue that their withdrawal from the market should be of little concern; indeed, it should be celebrated. Recent empirical evidence calls this assertion of retail noise trading into doubt, and this …

The Citizen Shareholder: Modernizing The Agency Paradigm To Reflect How And Why A Majority Of Americans Invest In The Market, Anne Tucker

Anne Tucker

This Article examines corporate law from the perspective of personal investment and discusses the economic realities of modern investments in order to understand the role of shareholders within the agency paradigm. Corporate law, its scholars, and suggested reforms traditionally focus on the internal organization of the corporation. For example, agency principles inform corporate law by acknowledging a potential conflict of interest between the managers and shareholders of a corporation. Reforms such as increased shareholder voting rights and proxy access, which seek to give shareholders a more direct means to make their interests known to managers, illustrate corporate law’s focus on …

Reverse Cross-Listings - The Coming Race To List In Emerging Markets And An Enhanced Understanding Of Classical Bonding, Nicholas C. Howson, Vikramaditya Khanna

Articles

Studies have found that when a U.S. issuer lists abroad on a foreign exchange, its shares exhibit negative abnormal returns. This negative movement may be because the market expects that the foreign listing will facilitate undetectable insider trading on the foreign exchange or other conduct impermissible in the United States.

Bad Company! The Assumptions Behind Proxy Advisors' Voting Recommendations, Bryce C. Tingle

Dalhousie Law Journal

The corporate governance challenge for Canada is to improve the quality of its corporate performance, which has been declining relative to its international peers for decades. This is quite different from the usual assumption that corporate governance is primarily a matter of controlling managerial self-dealing. While important, board monitoring of management is only one aspect of its role in a corporation; research suggests corporate governance arrangements have a significant impact on corporate outcomes, particularly in areas such as innovation where Canada lags. Third-party proxy advisory firms, which provide advice to institutional investors in Canada on corporate governance matters, have grown …

The Subprime Market Roller Coaster, Willa E. Gibson

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Please find attached an essay entitled “The Subprime Market Roller Coaster.” The essay discusses the economic and societal implications of the subprime market losses with an emphasis on the federal regulators’ inability to curtail such losses. It discusses collateralized mortgage obligations and how these debt securities fueled the subprime market. The essay discusses how each of the players – lenders, debtors, investment bankers, securities firms and investors – speculated on homes whose values were a mere illusion. It describes how each party along the chain starting with the lender used basic risk-shifting principles to engage in reckless speculation assuming they …

Reconciling Tax Law And Securities Regulation, Omri Marian

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Issuers in registered securities offerings must disclose the expected tax consequences to investors investing in the offered securities (“nonfinancial tax disclosure”). This Article advances three arguments regarding nonfinancial tax disclosures. First, nonfinancial tax disclosure practice, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) has sanctioned it, does not fulfill its intended regulatory purposes. Currently, nonfinancial tax disclosures provide irrelevant information, sometimes fail to provide material information, create unnecessary transaction costs, and divert valuable administrative resources to the enforcement of largely-meaningless requirements. Second, the practical reason for this failure is the SEC and tax practitioners’ unsuccessful attempt to address investors’ heterogeneous …

Securitization Of Student Loans: A Proposal To Reform Federal Accounting, Reduce Government Risk, And Introduce Market Mechanisms As Indicators Of Quality Education, Robert Proudfoot

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This Article outlines looming budgetary and accounting issues with federal student loans and proposes securitization as an innovative mechanism to reform federal accounting, reduce federal balance sheet risk, and provide a new education quality indicator. The current federal loan program is unsustainable because it overestimates the repayment rates and underestimates the cost of certain loan programs. Securitization will reduce that federal risk. Additionally, by forcing academic institutions to bear some of the risk, securitization will create a neutral pricing mechanism outside the direct control of federal regulators to show whether academic institutions provide a quality education. While complicated, this proposal …

No Power To Be Disloyal (Or, How Not To Write A Loyalty Opinion) , Val Ricks

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

It is the thesis of this paper that no privilege to act disloyally exists: that a power to act never trumps the duty of loyalty. My method is to discuss three cases in which the privilege or power to act appears to receive judicial support. The paper shows why this strategy does not work. Such assertions have no support in logic (and usually not in law), provide a slippery slope at the bottom of which the duty of loyalty ceases to exist, often result in a decision being internally inconsistent, and fail to stand the test of time. I will …

Legally "Strong" Shareholders Of Japan, Gen Goto

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

Foreign investors often criticize Japanese corporations for not paying enough attention to the interests of their shareholders. It might surprise these critics, then, to learn that shareholders’ legal rights under the Japanese Companies Act are actually quite strong. Indeed, many of the rights that shareholders’ rights advocates often support, including shareholders’ power to alter a corporate charter without board consent, shareholders’ power to control dividend payments, majority voting for board elections, shareholders’ power to replace the board of directors, and shareholder access to a corporate ballot—all of which are strongly debated elsewhere— are already effective in Japan. Moreover, derivative suits …

Insider Trading And Other Securities Frauds In The United States: Lessons For Chile, Dante Figueroa

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

This Article is a comparative analysis of insider trading law in the United States and Chile. The study summarily reviews the historical, political, and legal foundations of insider trading regulation in both jurisdictions, identifying areas of convergence, as well as areas in which the Chilean securities market could benefit vis- ` a-vis the more advanced experience of the considerably larger American securities market. The Article also highlights the axiological closeness between both jurisdictions concerning the protection of inside corporate information and the fiduciary role of those who intervene in securities markets in their various capacities (as investors, shareholders, corporate officers, …

The Fragmented Regulation Of Investment Advice: A Call For Harmonization, Christine Lazaro, Benjamin P. Edwards

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Decades of short-term thinking and regulatory fixes created the bewilderingly complex statutory and regulatory structures governing the giving of personalized investment advice to retail customers. Although deeply flawed, the current systems remain entrenched because of the difficulties inherent in making radical alterations. Importantly, the current patchwork systems do not seem to serve retail customers particularly well. Retail customers tend to make predictable and costly mistakes in allocating their assets. Some of this occurs because many investors lack basic financial literacy. A recent study released by the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “Commission”) on financial literacy among …

Improving Hedge Fund Governance, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the internal governance of hedge funds. The primary components of hedge fund governance are investors with a high propensity to exercise their short-term redemption rights; managers with high pay performance sensitivity, because they are being compensated with an annual performance-based fee plus earnings from their own investment in the funds they manage; sophisticated investors who demand quality governance; and short-term creditors and derivatives counterparties who provide close monitoring. Hedge fund governance needs the most improvement in the areas of performance reporting (valuation) and the timing of performance-fee calculations. Further, counterintuitively, in some circumstances …

The Materiality Of Morality: Conflict Minerals, Alexandrea L. Nelson

Utah Law Review

Shareholder activism is not a privilege—it is a right and a responsibility. When we invest in a company, we own part of that company and we are partly responsible for how that company progresses. If we believe there is something going wrong with the company, then we, as shareholders, must become active and vocal.