Faculty Bibliography

We review experimental research on judicial decision-making with a focus on methodological issues. First, we argue that only experiments with relatively high realism, in particular real judges as study subjects, plausibly generalize to judicial decision-making in the real world. Most experimental evidence shows lay subjects to behave very differently from expert judges in specifically legal tasks. Second, we argue that studying the effects of non-law is not a substitute for studying the effects of law since large unexplained residuals could be attributed to either. Direct experimental studies of the law effect are few and find it to be puzzlingly weak. Third, we review the substantive findings of experiments with judges, distinguishing between studies investigating legal and non-legal factors and paying close attention to the nature of the experimental task.

Experimental research on judicial decision-making is hampered by the difficulty of recruiting judges as experimental participants. Can students be used in judges’ stead? Unfortunately, no. We ran the same high-context 2×2 factorial experiment of judicial decision-making focused on legal reasoning with 31 U.S. federal judges and 91 elite U.S. law students. We obtained diametrically opposed results. Judges’ decisions were strongly associated with one factor (sympathy, i.e., bias) but not the other (law). For students, it was the other way around. Equality between the two groups is strongly rejected. Equality of document-view patterns—a proxy for thought processes—and written reasons is also strongly rejected.

We review experimental research on judicial decision-making with a focus on methodological issues. First, we argue that only experiments with relatively high realism, in particular real judges as study subjects, plausibly generalize to judicial decision-making in the real world. Most experimental evidence shows lay subjects to behave very differently from expert judges in specifically legal tasks. Second, we argue that studying the effects of non-law is not a substitute for studying the effects of law since large unexplained residuals could be attributed to either. Direct experimental studies of the law effect are few and find it to be puzzlingly weak. Third, we review the substantive findings of experiments with judges, distinguishing between studies investigating legal and non-legal factors and paying close attention to the nature of the experimental task.

Indirect investor protection (Spamann 2022) makes investment in most public securities safe even without understanding their terms or the underlying business. SPACs disable this protection by offering two alternative payoffs from the same security, the SPAC share, in the de-SPAC: the redemption value, or a share in the post-de-SPAC entity. The former is usually higher and chosen by sophisticated repeat players, while unsophisticated investors elect the latter or receive it by default (Klausner et al. 2022). Before the de-SPAC, the SPAC share price reflects the higher payoff, such that unsophisticated investors systematically overpay. This overpayment is captured, directly or indirectly, by SPAC sponsors and IPO investors. This allows the latter to make money from SPACs even if SPACs create negative social value.

In a pre-registered 2 × 2 × 2 factorial between-subject randomized lab experiment with 61 federal judges, we test if the law influences judicial decisions, if it does so more under a rule than under a standard, and how its influence compares to that of legally irrelevant sympathies. Participating judges received realistic materials and a relatively long period of time (50 min) to decide an auto accident case. We find at best weak evidence that the law matters or that rules constrain more than standards, and no evidence of a sympathy effect. (JEL K00, K13, K40, K41)

Heyes and Saberian (2019) estimate from 2000–2004 data that outdoor temperature reduces US immigration judges’ propensity to grant asylum. This estimate is the result of coding and data errors and of sample selection. Correcting the errors reduces the point estimate by two-thirds, with a wide 95 percent confidence interval straddling zero. Enlarging the sample to 1990–2019 flips the point estimate’s sign and rules out the effect size reported by Heyes and Saberian with very high confidence. An analysis of all criminal sentencing decisions by US federal district judges from 1992 to 2003 yields no evidence of temperature or other weather effects either.

Does it matter if corporate leaders pursue a broader, social corporate purpose rather than a narrow, shareholder-centric one, and can legal and governance levers influence their choice? Theoretically—and limited by substitution, regulation, and legitimacy—socially-minded corporate decision-making can benefit society ex post, while commitment to either purpose may be required to motivate various constituencies’ contributions ex ante. Empirically, however, even structural measures like employee co-determination hardly have detectable effects, let alone mere exhortations such as those in (unenforceable) nuances of (misunderstood) fiduciary duties. Many arguments for or against (particular) corporate purpose(s) are fallacies, red herrings, or, for empirics, cherry-picking.

This case study puts students in the role of a private equity firm considering the acquisition of a portfolio firm, and later selling that same firm. Along the way, the case study introduces private equity and valuation techniques, which students need to apply in working through the case.

This Teaching Note provides guidance to instructors for the case study Project Merchandise: An Introduction to Private Equity. The case study, Project Merchandise: An Introduction to Private Equity, puts students in the role of a private equity firm considering the acquisition of a portfolio company, and later selling that same company. Along the way, the case study introduces private equity and valuation techniques, which students will need to apply in working through the case.

Textual redundancy is one of the main challenges to ensuring that legal texts remain comprehensible and maintainable. Drawing inspiration from the refactoring literature in software engineering, which has developed methods to expose and eliminate duplicated code, we introduce the duplicated phrase detection problem for legal texts and propose the Dupex algorithm to solve it. Leveraging the Minimum Description Length principle from information theory, Dupex identifies a set of duplicated phrases, called patterns, that together best compress a given input text. Through an extensive set of experiments on the Titles of the United States Code, we confirm that our algorithm works well in practice: Dupex will help you simplify your law.

This site provides a more accessible version of the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL), and a guide to the Federal Proxy Rules.

We experimentally study the decision-making process of judges in China, where judges are specifically prohibited to cite prior decisions as the basis for their judgments, and where, in past surveys, most judges explicitly stated that precedent played at most a marginal role in their decisions. In an experiment resembling real-world judicial decision making, we find, however, that precedent seems to have a significant influence on the decisions of the participating Chinese judges. Indeed, judges spend more time reading prior cases than statutes, and they typically read precedents before they access the statutes. On the other hand, judges rarely mention the precedent in their reasons. Our findings suggest that the Chinese judiciary operates much more similarly to its homologues in the U.S. and elsewhere than their written opinions and much folklore would suggest.

In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by Ernst & Young (EY). The Report purports to find evidence of debilitating short-termism in EU corporate governance and recommends many changes to support sustainable corporate governance. In this paper, we point out deep flaws in the Report’s evidence and analysis. We recently submitted the content of this paper in response to the European Commission’s call for feedback. Parallel issues have arisen in American discourse, although none has reached the incipient lawmaking level that it has in Europe. First, the Report defines the corporate governance problem as one of pernicious short-termism that damages the environment, the climate, and stakeholders. But the Report mistakenly conflates time-horizon problems with externalities and distributional concerns. Cures for one are not cures for the others and a cure for one may well exacerbate the others. Second, the Report’s main evidence for an increase in corporate short-termism is rising gross payouts to shareholders (dividends and stock repurchases). However, the more relevant payout measure to assess corporations’ ability to fund long-term investment is net payouts (gross payouts minus equity issuances), which is much lower and has left plenty of funds available for long-term and short-term investment. Third, when the Report turns to other evidence for short-termism, it selectively picks academic studies that support its views on short-termism, while failing to engage substantial contrary literature. Significant studies fail to detect short-termism and some substantial studies show excessive long-termism. Conceptually, some short-termism is an unfortunate but an inevitable side effect of effective corporate governance and may not be a first-order problem warranting wholesale reform. Finally, the Report touts cures whose effectiveness has little evidentiary support and, for some, there is real evidence that the cures could be counterproductive and costly.

Preemptive rights are thought to protect minority shareholders from cheap-stock tunneling by a controlling shareholder. We show that preemptive rights, while making cheap-stock tunneling more difficult, cannot prevent it when asymmetric information about the value of the offered shares makes it impossible for the minority to know whether these shares are cheap or overpriced. Our analysis can help explain why sophisticated investors in unlisted firms and regulators of listed firms do not rely entirely on preemptive rights to address cheap-stock tunneling, supplementing them with other restrictions on equity issues.

This is the first chapter of the book Corporations in 100 Pages (2020), authored by Holger Spamann, Scott Hirst, and Gabriel Rauterberg. The book is an introduction to corporate law for students and anyone else interested in the foundations of corporate law. The book provides an accessible, self-contained presentation of the field’s essentials: what corporations are, how they are governed, their interactions with their investors, and other stakeholders, major transactions (M&A), and parallels with other legal entities, including partnerships. Optional background chapters cover the investor ecosystem, contemporary corporate governance, and corporate finance. The book’s exposition of doctrine and policy is nuanced and sophisticated, yet short and simple enough for a quick read. Chapter 1, “Corporations & Corporate Law,” introduces the book by addressing two questions: What are corporations? And what is corporate law? The chapter discusses the corporation as formally an abstraction to which the law assigns right and duties. Its extraordinary usefulness lies in how it allows large groups of people to organize relationships involving multiple assets, such as by pooling funds, transferring them to the corporation, and then allowing the corporation to serve as a single contracting interface with third parties. The chapter discusses how corporate law, as the subject is taught in law schools and discussed in practice, consists of the body of rules that govern the relationships among a corporation’s shareholders, its board of directors, and its managers; the relationships within each group; and the powers of each group to affect the corporation’s affairs. Corporate law is thus only a small subset of the far larger set of laws governing corporations, which includes “antitrust law,” “consumer law,” “environmental law,” and far more. Corporate law remains largely a matter of state statutory and common law, but also turns decisively on the corporation’s governing legal instruments, like the charter and bylaws, and contracts amongst its shareholders. Securities law also affects how corporations finance themselves. The chapter ends by providing examples of corporations, such as a small private corporation and a large public one, which illustrate the important legal features of the corporate form.

This statutory supplement (fall 2020 edition) is for the Corporations casebooks by Holger Spamann and by Holger Spamann and Guhan Subramanian. It contains excerpts from the Delaware General Corporation Law, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rules & Regulations promulgated by the Securities Exchange Commission pursuant to authority granted under the 1934 Act, as well as short excerpts from the Restatement of the Law Third (Agency) and the Uniform Partnership Act of 1914. It is current as of August 1, 2020.

Heyes and Saberian (AEJ-AE 2019) estimate from 2000-2004 data that outdoor temperature reduces U.S. immigration judges’ propensity to grant asylum. This estimate is the result of coding and data errors and of sample selection. Correcting the errors reduces the point estimate by two thirds, with a wide 95% confidence interval straddling zero. Enlarging the sample to 1990-2019 flips the point estimate’s sign and rules out the effect size reported in Heyes and Saberian with very high confidence. An analysis of all criminal sentencing decisions by U.S. federal district judges 1992-2003 yields no evidence of temperature or other weather effects either.

Law students randomly assigned to represent one side in a legal argument in the classroom exhibit substantial role-induced prediction bias for their side within only 40 minutes of their role assignment. Reminding students that prediction requires a more neutral perspective than advocacy does not attenuate the bias. The bias occurs evenly in male and female participants, who also report equal confidence in their predictions.

This book is a primer on corporate law for law students and anyone else interested in the foundations of corporate law. The book provides a self-contained, accessible presentation of the field’s essentials: what corporations are, how they are governed, their interactions with their investors and other stakeholders, major transactions (M&A), and parallels with alternative entities including partnerships. Optional background chapters cover the investor ecosystem, contemporary corporate governance, and corporate finance. The book’s exposition of doctrine and policy is nuanced and sophisticated yet short and simple enough for a quick read.

This is the fifth chapter of the book Corporations in 100 Pages (2020), authored by Holger Spamann, Scott Hirst, and Gabriel Rauterberg. The book is an introduction to corporate law for students and anyone else interested in the foundations of corporate law. The book provides an accessible, self-contained presentation of the field’s essentials: what corporations are, how they are governed, their interactions with their investors, and other stakeholders, major transactions (M&A), and parallels with other legal entities, including partnerships. Optional background chapters cover the investor ecosystem, contemporary corporate governance, and corporate finance. The book’s exposition of doctrine and policy is nuanced and sophisticated, yet short and simple enough for a quick read. Chapter 5 explains the law governing “Fiduciary Duties,” which are legal duties imposed on specific individuals (“fiduciaries”) who exercise power on behalf of others. The chapter first provides an overview of corporate fiduciary duties: who owes what to whom, and introduces the principal fiduciary duties of care and of loyalty. The chapter then distinguishes standards of conduct and standards of review, and explains the two main standards of review that apply to fiduciary duties in corporate law, the “business judgment rule” and “entire fairness.” The chapter then explains how these standards of review apply to the paradigm cases of self-dealing and mere carelessness, as well as to cases involving corporate opportunities, bad faith, knowing violations of law, and (lack of) candor or oversight.

This is the seventh chapter of the book Corporations in 100 Pages (2020), authored by Holger Spamann, Scott Hirst, and Gabriel Rauterberg. The book is an introduction to corporate law for students and anyone else interested in the foundations of corporate law. The book provides an accessible, self-contained presentation of the field’s essentials: what corporations are, how they are governed, their interactions with their investors, and other stakeholders, major transactions (M&A), and parallels with other legal entities, including partnerships. Optional background chapters cover the investor ecosystem, contemporary corporate governance, and corporate finance. The book’s exposition of doctrine and policy is nuanced and sophisticated, yet short and simple enough for a quick read. Chapter 7, “Mergers and Acquisitions,” discusses ways of buying all or part of a corporation. The chapter provides an overview of these transactions and introduces key concepts and the main sources of law. The chapter then explains the three ways in which all or part of a corporation can be acquired—by acquiring its assets, acquiring its shares, and through a merger with another corporation—and the legal and practical differences between the three structures and variants thereof. The chapter explains the difference between friendly and hostile transactions, and the legal rules regarding how corporations may permissibly defend themselves against hostile transactions. The chapter also discusses the special considerations and rules that apply to mergers and acquisitions involving controlling shareholders. Finally, the chapter discusses litigation concerning mergers and acquisitions.

A popular research design identifies the effects of corporate governance by (changes in) state laws, clustering standard errors by state of incorporation. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, this paper shows that conventional statistical tests based on these standard errors dramatically overreject: in a typical design, randomly generated “placebo laws” are “significant” at the 1/5/10% level 9/21/30% of the time. This poor coverage is due to the extremely unequal cluster sizes, especially Delaware's concentration of half of all incorporations. Fixes recommended in the literature fail, including degrees-of-freedom corrections and the cluster wild bootstrap. The paper proposes a permutation test for valid inference.

This statutory supplement (fall 2019 edition) is for the Corporations casebook by Holger Spamann and Guhan Subramanian. It contains excerpts from the Delaware General Corporation Law, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rules & Regulations promulgated by the Securities Exchange Commission pursuant to authority granted under the 1934 Act, as well as short excerpts from the Restatement of the Law Third (Agency) and the Uniform Partnership Act of 1914. It is current as of August 1, 2019.

Law students randomly assigned to represent one side in a legal argument in the classroom exhibit substantial role-induced prediction bias for their side within only 40 minutes of their role assignment. Reminding students that prediction requires a more neutral perspective than advocacy does not attenuate the bias. The bias occurs evenly in male and female participants, who also report equal confidence in their predictions.

William Eskridge and Lauren Baer’s (96 GEO. L. J. 1083 (2008)) “empirical study of all 1014 Supreme Court cases between Chevron and Hamdan in which an agency interpretation of a statute was at issue” finds that “the Court does not apply the Chevron framework in nearly three-quarters of the cases where it would appear applicable.” Our reexamination of this study finds that the fraction of such cases is far lower, and indeed closer to zero. Our main methodological innovation is to infer Chevron applicability from Supreme Court litigants’ briefs rather than our own evaluation of the cases’ facts, as in Eskridge and Baer’s study. In over half the cases flagged by Eskridge and Baer, neither of the parties (nor, where applicable, the Solicitor General as amicus) cited Chevron, and in almost half of the cases within that subset, no one argued for or against deference of any kind. In most of a sample of the remaining cases, the Supreme Court either did not need to reach the Chevron issue, or actually applied it, at least in an abbreviated form.

This book is designed for a first course in corporate law. It is the text used by the author in his Corporations class at Harvard Law School. Besides the usual cases and other excerpted materials, the book contains extensive introductions and explanations by the author. The content is also available online at https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/79342-corporations; it is current as of December 2018.

Cho, Barnes, and Guanara (2017) analyzed criminal sentencing by U.S. federal judges in the years 1992 through 2003. Controlling for case covariates, they estimated that “sentences rendered on sleepy Mondays”—Mondays immediately following the start of daylight saving time, when the night from Saturday to Sunday is shortened by 1 hr—“were approximately 5% longer than those rendered on [the immediately preceding and subsequent] Mondays” (p. 243). Cho et al. estimated that so large a difference would arise by chance with a probability of only 0.5% if judges tended to render equal sentences on those three Mondays (i.e., p = .005). Cho et al. interpreted this finding as evidence that sleep-deprived judges punish more harshly than judges who have not been sleep deprived. This Commentary raises three concerns about Cho et al.’s analysis and conclusions. First, Cho et al. reported results from a model that differed from the model described in their article. The latter model is theoretically superior but yields a nonsignificant result. Second, even the model used by Cho et al. yields a much smaller, nonsignificant coefficient if one accounts for judges’ choice whether to impose any prison time at all, as is standard in the sentencing literature. Third, new data from 2004 through 2016 show not even a trace of a sleepy-Monday effect. Table 1 summarizes all four models mentioned thus far (Models 1, 2, 4, and 7) along with several models providing robustness checks (Models 3, 5, 6, and 8), and the remainder of this Commentary discusses these eight models in more detail. At the outset, it is worth noting that Cho et al.’s result depends entirely on their model: As reported in their note 3, a model without their control variables did not yield a statistically significant estimate of a sleepy-Monday effect.

The Supreme Court has looked to the rights of corporate shareholders in determining the rights of union members and non-members to control political spending, and vice versa. The Court sometimes assumes that if shareholders disapprove of corporate political expression, they can easily sell their shares or exercise control over corporate spending. This assumption is mistaken. Because of how capital is saved and invested, most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about corporate political activities, even after the fact, nor can they prevent their savings from being used to speak in ways with which they disagree. Individual shareholders have no “opt out” rights or practical ability to avoid subsidizing corporate political expression with which they disagree. Nor do individuals have the practical option to refrain from putting their savings into equity investments, as doing so would impose damaging economic penalties and ignore conventional financial guidance for individual investors.Most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about a corporation’s speech or political activities, even after the fact, nor can most shareholders prevent their savings from being used for political activity with which they disagree. More generally, the Court's focus on whether union non-members are effectively forced to fund political speech or activity with which they disagree should reflect the fact that most Americans must routinely fund speech with which they disagree. While some of this compulsion is from practical reality rather than law there are numerous examples outside the union context of laws that require individuals to fund expressive activities. There is, simply put, very little way for most individuals in modern America to avoid subsidizing speech with which they disagree.

This book provides cases, commentaries, case studies, and discussion questions on corporate law. It is intended for use in the introductory course in corporate law at U.S. law schools. Emphasis is placed on Delaware corporate law, though comparative perspectives are developed as well. Teaching slides and teaching notes are available from the authors. The book has a Statutory Supplement.

Despite a declining prison population, the US still sends more people to jail per capita than any other country. But does this predilection towards incarceration lead to lower crime rates? By relating crime and incarceration data to country-specific data on measures such as development and social policy Holger Spamann finds that the US’ incarceration rate is a distinct outlier given the amount of crime it experiences. He writes that the incarceration gap may be down to factors such as poor race relations, but that it is more likely that the US’ policy of mass incarceration simply doesn’t do enough to deter or prevent crime.

We experimentally investigate the determinants of judicial decisions in a setting resembling real-world judicial decision-making. U.S. federal judges (N=32) spend 55 minutes judging a real appeals case from an international tribunal, with minor modifications to accommodate the experimental treatments. The fictitious briefs focus on one easily understandable issue of law. Our 2×2 between-subject factorial design crosses a weak precedent and legally irrelevant defendant characteristics. In a survey, law professors predicted that the precedent would have a stronger effect than the defendant characteristics. In actuality, the precedent has no detectable effect on the judges’ decisions, whereas the two defendants’ affirmance rates differ by 45% (p<.01). Judges’ written reasons, on the other hand, do not mention defendant characteristics at all, focusing instead on the precedent and other legalistic and policy considerations.

In this comment on Gelbach (JITE 2016), I make two points. First, I support Gelbach’s application of mechanism design (MD) to legal design because it takes information requirements and other constraints seriously. MD derives the best rule under the stated constraints. This rigorously confirms the existing rule’s optimality, reveals a superior alternative, or, if the MD solution appears unrealistic, uncovers additional constraints that any real solution must satisfy. Second, I consider implementing the social optimum, rather than the private optimum. In Gelbach’s discovery example, even a court with limited information can objectively implement some social goals; for other social goals, the court can at least do the best it can according to its subjective beliefs.

I generate out-of-sample predictions of US crime and incarceration rates from cross-country regressions. Predictors suggested in the literature explain a large part of the international variation, but fail to explain the US. The US incarceration rate is four times higher than predicted, while US crime rates are at best slightly below the prediction. An explanation of this US crime puzzle requires a low crime-punishment elasticity at US levels of punishment, and/or an extraordinarily high US latent crime rate. I derive joint bounds for the two. Drawing on additional country-specific information, I argue that the most plausible explanation combines both elements.

This article clarifies why optimal corporate governance generally excludes monetary liability for breach of directors’ and managers’ fiduciary duty of care. In principle, payments predicated on third-party investigations of directors’ and managers’ business decisions could usefully supplement payments predicated on stock prices or accounting figures in the provision of performance incentives, including risk-taking incentives. Consequently, the reason not to use liability incentives is not absolute but a cost-benefit trade-off: Litigation is expensive, while the benefits from refining incentives are limited. The analysis rationalizes many existing exceptions from non-liability but also leads to novel recommendations, particularly for entities other than public corporations.

The finances of many states, cities, and other localities are in dire straits. In this Article, we argue that partial responsibility for this situation lies with the outdated and ineffective financial reporting regime for public entities. Ineffective reporting has obscured and continues to obscure the extent of municipal financial problems, thus delaying or even preventing corrective actions. Worse, ineffective reporting has created incentives for accounting gimmicks that have directly contributed to the dramatic decline of public sector finances. Fixing the reporting regime is thus a necessary first step toward fiscal recovery. We provide concrete examples of advisable changes in accounting rules and advocate for institutional changes, particularly Securities and Exchange Commission involvement, that we hope will lead to better public accounting rules generally.

Detroit's bankruptcy highlighted what savvy observers have been warning about for years: The finances of many states, cities, and other localities are in dire straits. The authors believe that this financial calamity is partly attributable to the outdated and ineffective financial reporting regime for public entities, and that fixing this regime is a necessary first step toward fiscal recovery. The current regime omits foreseeable long-term consequences from reported financial numbers. This omission blinds citizens, and perhaps even politicians, to the long-term repercussions of policy choices. It may even prompt politicians to choose economically suboptimal measures precisely because it allows them to misrepresent their financial performance to voters.

I review the empirical comparative law literature with an emphasis on quantitative work. After situating the field and surveying its main applications to date, I turn to methodological issues. I discuss at length the obstacles to causal inference from comparative data, and caution against inappropriate use of instrumental variables and other techniques. Even if comparative data cannot identify any single causal theory, however, they are extremely important in narrowing down the set of plausible theories. I report progress in measurement design and suggest improvements in data analysis and interpretation using techniques from other fields, particularly growth econometrics.

This paper exposits a model of parallel trading of corporate securities (shares, bonds) and derivatives (TRS, CDS) in which a large trader can sometimes profitably acquire securities with their corporate control rights for the sole purpose of reducing the corporation's value and gaining on a net short position created through off-setting derivatives. At other times, the large trader profitably takes a net long position. The large trader requires no private information beyond its own trades. The problem is most likely to manifest when derivatives trade on an exchange and transactions give blocking powers to small minorities, particularly out-of-bankruptcy restructurings and freezeouts.

This playlist is a virtual casebook for the Corporations course. I designed it as a substitute for the traditional hardbound casebook.

In the 1980s, battles of corporate ownership were fierce, but one oil corporation, Unocal, was prepared to defend itself. President and CEO Fred Hartley did not believe in corporate takeovers; he thought such moves prevented corporations from managing for long-term success. So when T. Boone Pickens, chairman of Mesa Petroleum, announced a tender offer to Unocal shareholders, the Unocal board was determined to outmuscle the corporate raider. No legal precedent existed for the recent phenomenon of hostile takeovers, but Unocal’s general counsel still had to advise the board: how could Unocal be saved? The case study provides the economic context of Unocal’s decision, surveying the 1980s merger mania, the rise of junk bonds, T. Boone Pickens’s raiding streak, and the moves that Unocal and Mesa made leading up to Mesa’s tender offer. Participants are placed in the strategic and decision-making position of the Unocal board of directors and are asked to consider, from among the business tactics to block a hostile takeover, those options that fulfill the board’s fiduciary duties to the company. Participants work in teams to brainstorm the Unocal board’s next steps, and subsequent class discussion addresses the misguided options available to the board. Participants will also analyze the legality and effectiveness of the strategy Unocal ultimately chose.

Economists have documented pervasive correlations between legal origins, modern regulation, and economic outcomes around the world. Where legal origin is exogenous, however, it is almost perfectly correlated with another set of potentially relevant background variables: the colonial policies of the European powers that spread the “origin” legal systems through the world. We attempt to disentangle these factors by exploiting the imperfect overlap of colonizer and legal origin, and looking at possible channels, such as the structure of the legal system, through which these factors might influence contemporary economic outcomes. We find strong evidence in favor of non-legal colonial explanations for economic growth. For other dependent variables, the results are mixed.

This paper empirically compares civil procedure in common-law and civil-law countries. Using World-Bank and hand-collected data, and unlike earlier studies that used predecessor data sets, this paper find no systematic differences between common- and civil-law countries in the complexity, formalism, duration, or cost of procedure in courts of first instance. The paper further finds that by a subjective measure, contract enforceability in common-law countries is higher than in French, but lower than in German and Scandinavian, civil-law countries. Given civil procedure's central role for the common-civil-law distinction, these findings challenge the distinction's economic relevance.

The “antidirector rights index” has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in over a hundred articles since it was introduced by La Porta et al. (“Law and Finance.” 1998, Journal of Political Economy 106:1113–55). A thorough reexamination of the legal data, however, leads to corrections for thirty-three of the forty-six countries analyzed. The correlation between corrected and original values is only 0.53. Consequently, many empirical results established using the original index may not be replicable with corrected values. In particular, the corrected index fails to support three widely influential claims: that shareholder protection is higher in common than in civil law countries; that shareholder protection predicts stock market size or ownership dispersion; and that weak corporate governance explains the extent of exchange rate depreciation during the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998.

This paper seeks to make three contributions to understanding how banks’ executive pay has produced incentives for excessive risk-taking and how such pay should be reformed. First, although there is now wide recognition that pay packages focused excessively on short-term results, we analyze a separate and critical distortion that has received little attention. Equity-based awards, coupled with the capital structure of banks, tie executives’ compensation to a highly levered bet on the value of banks’ assets. Because bank executives expect to share in any gains that might flow to common shareholders, but are insulated from losses that the realization of risks could impose on preferred shareholders, bondholders, depositors, and taxpayers, executives have incentives to give insufficient weight to the downside of risky strategies. Second, we show that corporate governance reforms aimed at aligning the design of executive pay arrangements with the interests of banks’ common shareholders - such as advisory shareholder votes on compensation arrangements, use of restricted stock awards, and increased director oversight and independence -cannot eliminate the identified problem. In fact, the interests of common shareholders could be served by more risk-taking than is socially desirable. Accordingly, while such measures could eliminate risk-taking that is excessive even from shareholders’ point of view, they cannot be expected to prevent risk-taking that serves shareholders but is socially excessive. Third, we develop a case for using regulation of banks’ executive pay as an important element of financial regulation. We provide a normative foundation for such pay regulation, analyze how regulators should monitor and regulate bankers’ pay, and show how pay regulation can complement and reinforce the traditional forms of financial regulation.

The standard narrative of the meltdown of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers assumes that the wealth of the top executives at these firms was largely wiped out along with their firms. In the ongoing debate about regulatory responses to the financial crisis, commentators have used this assumed fact as a basis for dismissing both the role of compensation structures in inducing risk-taking and the potential value of reforming such structures. This Article provides a case study of compensation at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers during 2000-2008 and concludes that this assumed fact is incorrect. We find that the top-five-executive teams at these firms cashed out large amounts of performance-based compensation during this period. From 2000-2008, they were able to cash out large amounts of bonus compensation that were not clawed back when the firms collapsed, and to pocket large amounts from selling shares. Overall, we estimate that the top executive teams of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers derived cash flows of about $1.4 billion and $1 billion, respectively, from cash bonuses and equity sales during 2000-2008. These cash flows substantially exceeded the value of the executives' initial holdings at the beginning of the period, and the executives' net payoffs for the period were thus decidedly positive. The divergence between how the top executives and their shareholders fared implies that it is not possible to rule out, as standard narratives suggest, that the executives' pay arrangements provided them with excessive risk-taking incentives. We discuss the implications of our analysis for understanding the possible role that pay arrangements have played in the run-up to the financial crisis and how they should be reformed going forward.

A substantial body of comparative legal scholarship considers statements applicable to large, conceptually infinite numbers of countries. Such statements gain in credibility if they are supported by evidence from large samples of countries. Processing such vast evidence requires quantitative methods. Designing the requisite numerical measures of law is not straightforward, but an important insight from statistics suggests that this problem can be overcome by appropriate research design. While in practice considering more countries comes at the expense of less information per country, on balance large sample, quantitative research designs promise to yield interesting insights for comparative law.