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Initial Public Offering And Optimal Corporate Governance, Albert H. Choi
Initial Public Offering And Optimal Corporate Governance, Albert H. Choi
Law & Economics Working Papers
This paper examines the long-standing debate over whether firms have a market-based incentive to adopt optimal governance provisions at their initial public offering (IPO). Various scholars and practitioners have argued that firms that offer stock to the public with suboptimal governance structure will be penalized by the market through a lower IPO price. At the same time, others have documented empirical evidence that many IPO firms have putatively suboptimal governance provisions, such as anti-takeover provisions and dual class structure, and many, especially those with dual-class structure, enjoy a market premium at their IPO. This paper attempts to bridge this gap. …
Controlling Externalities: Ownership Structure And Cross-Firm Externalities, Dhammika Dharmapala, Vikramaditya S. Khanna
Controlling Externalities: Ownership Structure And Cross-Firm Externalities, Dhammika Dharmapala, Vikramaditya S. Khanna
Law & Economics Working Papers
In recent years, debates over the social purpose of corporations have taken center stage amidst rising concern about externalities (such as those associated with climate change and harmful speech) generated by firms. A key motivation is the claim that government regulation and liability regimes appear not to be functioning sufficiently well to force firms to internalize these externalities. There is thus rising interest in exploring alternative mechanisms. In particular, a rapidly growing body of scholarship argues that index funds increasingly approximate diversified “universal owners” with incentives to maximize portfolio value (and thus to internalize cross-firm externalities). However, much of this …