Faculty Bibliography

The securities laws currently permit certain firms to exit the mandatory disclosure system even though their shares are held by hundreds (or even thousands) of investors and continue to be publicly traded. Such exiting firms are said to "go dark" because they subsequently provide little information to public investors. This paper addresses the going-dark phenomenon and its implications for the debate over mandatory disclosure. Mandatory disclosure's critics contend that insiders of publicly traded firms will always voluntarily provide adequate information to investors. The disclosure choices of gone-dark firms raise doubts about this claim. The paper also puts forward a new approach to regulating going-dark firms: giving public shareholders a veto right over exits from mandatory disclosure. Such an approach, it shows, will prevent undesirable exits from mandatory disclosure while preserving firms' ability to engage in value-increasing exits.

Despite recent reforms, public company executives can still use inside information to time their stock sales, secretly boosting their pay. They can also still inflate the stock price before selling. Such insider trading and price manipulation imposes large costs on shareholders. This paper suggests that executives' options be cashed out according to a pre-specified, gradual schedule. These hands-off options would substantially reduce the costs associated with current equity arrangements while imposing little burden on executives.

Despite the insider trading laws and Sarbanes-Oxley, Jesse Fried argues that executives still make billions of dollars of insider trading profits each year by timing their stock sales: requiring advance disclosure of such trades would go far to address this problem.

Venture capitalists investing in U.S. startups typically receive preferred stock and extensive control rights. Various explanations for each of these arrangements have been offered. However, scholars have failed to notice that when combined these arrangements result in a highly unusual corporate governance structure: one in which preferred shareholders, not common shareholders, control the board and the firm. The purpose of this Article is threefold: (1) to highlight the unusual governance structure of these VC-backed startups; (2) to show that preferred shareholder control can give rise to potentially large agency costs, and (3) to suggest legal reforms that may help VCs and entrepreneurs reduce these agency costs and improve corporate governance in startups.

Public companies in the United States and elsewhere increasingly use open market stock buybacks, rather than dividends, to distribute cash to shareholders. Academic commentators have emphasized the possible benefits of such repurchases for shareholders. However, little attention has been paid to their potential drawbacks. This Article shows that managers use open market repurchases to indirectly buy stock for themselves at a bargain price. Managers also boost stock prices by announcing repurchase programs they do not intend to execute, enabling them to unload their own shares at a higher price. Such bargain repurchases and inflated-price sales systematically transfer significant amounts of value from public investors to managers, as well as distort managers' payout decisions. The Article concludes by proposing a new approach to regulating open market repurchases: requiring firms to disclose specific details of their buy orders in advance. This pre-repurchase disclosure rule, the Article shows, would undermine managers' ability to use repurchases for informed trading and false signaling, thereby reducing the resulting distortions and costs to shareholders. Moreoever, it would achieve these objectives without eroding any of the potential benefits of repurchases.

This paper is a case study of Fannie Mae's executive compensation arrangements during the period 2000-2004. We identify and analyze four problems with these arrangements: - First, by richly rewarding executives for reporting higher earnings, without requiring return of the compensation if earnings turned out to be misstated, Fannie Mae's arrangement provided perverse incentives to inflate earnings. - Second, Fannie Mae's arrangements provided soft landings to executives who were pushed out by the board for failure; expectation of such outcome adversely affected ex ante incentives. - Third, even if the executives had retired after years of unblemished service, the value of their retirement packages would have been largely unrelated to their own performance. - Fourth, both when promising retirement payments to executives and when making theses payments, Fannie Mae's disclosures obscured rather than made transparent the total values of the executives' retirement packages. Because many other companies have practices similar to Fannie Mae's, our case study highlights some general problems with existing pay practices and the need for reform.

In a recent book, Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of executive Compensation, we critique existing executive pay arrangements and the corporate governance processes producing them, and put forward proposals for improving both executive pay and corporate governance. This paper provides an overview of the main elements of our critique and proposals. We show that, under current legal arrangements, boards cannot be expected to contract at arm's length with the executives whose pay they set. We discuss how managers' influence can explain many features of the executive compensation landscape, including ones that researchers subscribing to the arm's length contracting view have long viewed as puzzling. We also explain how managerial influence can lead to inefficient arrangements that generate weak or even perverse incentives, as well as to arrangements that make the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay less transparent. Finally, we outline our proposals for improving the transparency of executive pay, the connection between pay and performance, and the accountability of corporate boards.

This paper analyzes an important form of "stealth compensation" provided to managers of public companies. We show how boards have been able to camouflage large amount of executive compensation through the use of retirement benefits and payments. Our study highlights the significant role that camouflage and stealth compensation play in the design of compensation arrangements. Our study also highlights the significance of whether information about compensation arrangements is not merely publicly available but also communicated in a way that is transparent and accessible to outsiders.

According to conventional wisdom, insiders' use of private information to abstain from trading raises the same policy concerns as insider trading. This widely held perception has dominated much of the academic debate over the regulation of insider trading. I show that this view is flatly incorrect: as long as insiders cannot trade while in possession of nonpublic information, their ability to use nonpublic information to abstain from trading does not make them better off than public shareholders. I then explain why insider abstention cannot give rise to the same type of economic distortions that might be associated with insider trading. I conclude by analyzing the implications of my findings for a number of issues in insider trading regulation, including the use vs. possession debate and the Rule 10b5-1 safe harbor.

This paper develops an account of the role and significance of rent extraction in executive compensation. Under the optimal contracting view of executive compensation, which has dominated academic research on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors that aims to maximize shareholder value by designing an optimal principal-agent contract. Under the alternative rent extraction view that we examine, the board does not operate at arm’s length; rather, executives have power to influence their own compensation, and they use their power to extract rents. As a result, executives are paid more than is optimal for shareholders and, to camouflage the extraction of rents, executive compensation might be structured sub-optimally. The presence of rent extraction, we argue, is consistent both with the processes that produce compensation schemes and with the market forces and constraints that companies face. Examining the large body of empirical work on executive compensation, we show that the picture emerging from it is largely compatible with the rent extraction view. Indeed, rent extraction, and the desire to camouflage it, can better explain many puzzling features of compensation patterns and practices. We conclude that extraction of rents might well play a significant role in U.S. executive compensation; and that the significant presence of rent extraction should be taken into account in any examination of the practice and regulation of corporate governance.

The leading view among corporate law scholars is that an insolvent firm's managers should maximize the sum of the values of all financial claims - both those held by shareholders and those held by creditors - against the firm. This Article points out a previously unrecognized problem with this financial value maximization (FVM) approach. What FVM proponents have overlooked is that an insolvent firm is likely to have two types of creditors: (1) payment creditors - parties owed cash, who hold financial claims against the firm; and (2) performance creditors - parties owed contractual performance, who hold claims for performance against the firm. The FVM approach requires managers to take into account the effect of their actions on payment creditors but not on performance creditors. We show that FVM's failure to account for performance creditors might cause an insolvent firm's managers to act in a way that harms performance creditors more than it benefits those with financial claims against the firm and, therefore, is inefficient. Our analysis indicates that an insolvent firm's managers should be obligated to maximize the sum of the values of all claims (both cash and performance) against the firm. This approach, we show, would eliminate the distortions associated with the FVM approach and make shareholders better off ex ante.

This paper develops an account of the role and significance of rent extraction in executive compensation. Under the optimal contracting view of executive compensation, which has dominated academic research on the subject, pay arrangements are set by a board of directors that aims to maximize shareholder value by designing an optimal principal-agent contract. Under the alternative rent extraction view that we examine, the board does not operate at arm’s length; rather, executives have power to influence their own compensation, and they use their power to extract rents. As a result, executives are paid more than is optimal for shareholders and, to camouflage the extraction of rents, executive compensation might be structured sub-optimally. The presence of rent extraction, we argue, is consistent both with the processes that produce compensation schemes and with the market forces and constraints that companies face. Examining the large body of empirical work on executive compensation, we show that the picture emerging from it is largely compatible with the rent extraction view. Indeed, rent extraction, and the desire to camouflage it, can better explain many puzzling features of compensation patterns and practices. We conclude that extraction of rents might well play a significant role in U.S. executive compensation; and that the significant presence of rent extraction should be taken into account in any examination of the practice and regulation of corporate governance.

Managers conduct open market repurchases (“OMRs”) for many different reasons, including to distribute excess cash. However, the most widely discussed explanation for OMRs is the “signaling theory:” that managers announce OMRs to signal that the stock is underpriced. The first purpose of this paper is to show that the signaling theory is theoretically problematic—in part because it assumes managers deliberately sacrifice their own wealth to increase that of shareholders—as well as inconsistent with much of the empirical evidence. The second purpose of the paper is to put forward an alternative explanation for managers’ use of OMRs: the managerial-opportunism theory. This theory, which assumes that managers seek to maximize their own wealth, predicts that managers announce OMRs both when the stock is underpriced and when it is not. When the stock is underpriced, managers may announce and conduct an OMR to transfer value to themselves and other remaining shareholders. When managers wish to sell a large portion of their shares, they announce an OMR to boost the stock price before selling their shares. The paper shows that managerial opportunism is not only a more plausible motive for OMRs than is signaling, it is also more consistent with the empirical data. The paper concludes by describing some testable predictions of the theory.

Cash distributed to public shareholders is distributed through three mechanisms: dividends, open market repurchases (OMRs), and repurchase tender offers (RTOs). The leading explanation for why a corporation would distribute cash through an RTO rathe than an OMR or a dividend is the signaling theory: that managers use RTOs to signal that the stock is underpriced. The Article has three main purposes: (1) to challenge the signaling theory, by exposing a flaw in one of its key assumptions and presenting empirical data suggesting that the theory cannot account for most RTOs; (2) to show that the same empirical data are consistent with insiders using RTOs to engage in insider trading with public shareholders; and (3) to propose that insiders be (a) required to disclose their tendering decision before the close of the RTO and (b) forbidden from selling stock outside of the RTO until six months after the announcement date. The Article explains how this disclose/delay rule would substantially reduce insiders' ability to use RTOs for insider trading, without interfering with the use of RTOs for any other purpose (including signaling).

Over the last six decades, the federal government has constructed an extensive system of civil and criminal laws designed to reduce the ability of corporate insiders to make profits trading on inside information. During the 1980s, the government sought to increase the system's effectiveness by increasing penalties and devoting more resources to enforcement. However, both the volume of trading by corporate insiders and the profits these insiders make from corporate insider trading have increased dramatically since these measures were put into effect. In fact, I calculate that corporate insiders make almost $5 billion per year in insider trading profits. After surveying the evidence that corporate insiders trade on inside information, this Article explains why insiders are able to engage in such trading. The Article then puts forward a simple method for reducing insiders' ability to make profits trading on inside information: requiring insiders to disclose publicly their intended trades shortly before submitting orders to their brokers. The Article shows that this pretrading disclosure rule could substantially reduce aggregate corporate insider trading profits. The Article also explains how adopting a pretrading disclosure rule would enable the government to eliminate some of the existing restrictions on insiders' trading and thereby reduce the overall regulatory burden on insiders.

In Israel, as in a number of other economies, a few large banks have historically played a major role in the nonfinancial sector. At the end of 1995, the Israeli government appointed the Brodet Committee to examine bank investments in nonfinancial corporations. The Israeli Knesset subsequently adopted the committee's recommendations and imposed major limitations on the role of banks in the nonfinancial sector. These limitations required the two biggest Israeli banks to start selling much of their nonfinancial investments. This paper is based on the research report that we prepared for the Brodet Committee at the request of the Israeli Finance Ministry and Antitrust Authority. We explain why we recommended to the Committee that substantial limitations be imposed on bank investment in nonfinancial companies. We provide a detailed analysis of the effects that bank- conglomerate combinations have in a small economy -- such as Israel's -- that is characterized by a great deal of concentration in both the financial and nonfinancial sectors. In particular, we analyze the effects that bank-conglomerate combinations have on the safety and soundness of banks, on the decisions of the investment funds managed by banks, and on the level of competition in the economy in both the short run and the long run.

This paper focuses on the treatment in bankruptcy of a debtor's executory contracts - contracts under which the debtor still owes (or is owed) performance at the time it files for bankruptcy. Under the bankruptcy laws of most countries, including the U.S., the bankruptcy trustee usually disposes of an executory contract in one of two ways: either by (1) assuming and seeking performance of the contract; or by (2) rejecting the contract, in which case any resulting damage claim is treated as a prebankruptcy unsecured claim and receives its ratable share of the assets available to pay unsecured claims. Since such unsecured claims are typically paid only a fraction of their face amount, a party injured by rejection usually receives less than full compensation. This approach is widely supported by U.S. bankruptcy commentators. The paper first explains how this ratable damages rule can give the bankruptcy trustee an incentive to reject contracts when performance would be efficient. It then shows that the manner in which the ratable damages rule is actually applied by U.S. courts tends to worsen the problem. The paper concludes by considering various arrangements for eliminating the distortion.

This paper reexamines a longstanding principle of bankruptcy law: that secured claims are entitled to be paid in full before unsecured claims receive any payment. There is a widespread consensus among legal scholars and economists that according full priority to secured claims is desirable because it promotes economic efficiency. Our analysis, however, demonstrates that full priority actually distorts the arrangements negotiated between commercial borrowers and their creditors, producing various efficiency costs. We show that according only partial priority to secured claims could eliminate or reduce these efficiency costs - and that such an approach might well be superior to the rule of full priority. The analysis also suggests that a mandatory rule of partial priority could be effectively implemented within the framework of existing bankruptcy law, and that such an approach would be consistent with fairness and freedom of contract considerations. We therefore present two different rules of partial priority that should be considered as alternatives to full priority.