A study by Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 and Boston University Professor Scott Hirst LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’16, “Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, and Policy,” was selected in an annual poll of corporate and securities law professors as one of the ten best corporate and securities articles of 2019.
The top ten articles were selected from a field of nearly 400 articles published in legal journals during 2019, according to an announcement by Georgetown Professor Robert Thompson, published on the Corporate Practice Commentator blog.
The Bebchuk and Hirst article was issued as a study of the HLS Program on Corporate Governance and was subsequently published in the December 2020 issue of the Columbia Law Review. The article was earlier the recipient of three prizes:
- The Jaime Fernández de Araoz Award on Corporate Finance, which carries with it a prize of 10,000 EUR;
- The IRRC Institute Prize, which carries with it a cash award of $10,000; and
- The European Corporate Governance Institute’s Cleary Gottlieb Steen Hamilton Prize, which carries with it a EUR 5,000 award.
The article is the 13th article authored or co-authored by Bebchuk that has been selected as one of the best corporate and securities articles during the years in which the annual poll was conducted.
The Bebchuk and Hirst article is part of the Corporate Governance Program’s larger ongoing project on stewardship by index funds and other institutional investors. The article builds on an analytical framework for understanding the monitoring and engagement decisions made by index funds put forward in a 2017 study, “The Agency Problems of Institutional Investors,” by Bebchuk, Hirst and Professor of Empirical Practice Alma Cohen (discussed on the Forum here). The analysis in the article is supplemented by an empirical study by Bebchuk and Hirst, “The Specter of the Giant Three” (discussed on the Forum here), which examines the substantial and continuing growth of the so-called Big Three index fund managers.