J.W. Verret is an Assistant Professor at George Mason University School of Law.
In Business Roundtable v. SEC, the DC Court of Appeals struck down the proxy access rule giving certain shareholders access to the corporate proxy on the grounds that the SEC failed to adequately fulfill its requirement to consider the impact of new rules on “efficiency, competition, and capital formation.” The Court offered a blistering critique of the SEC’s economic analysis in the rule. Criticism of the opinion followed and also led to a series of Congressional hearings on the SEC’s process for weighing the economic costs and benefits of new rules. Many of the critics of the opinion, and indeed of cost-benefit analysis itself, have argued that it is simply too difficult to guide rulemaking, or that costs are easier to measure than benefits and so the approach trends against the status quo.
I counter that critique of Business Roundtable by way of example in an article co-authored with Thomas Stratmann in the Stanford University Law Review, Does Shareholder Proxy Access Damage Share Value in Small Publicly Traded Companies? We suggest a question the SEC might itself have investigated about its approach, if it had submitted a rule proposal first and if it was committed to economic analysis of its rules. We consider a natural experiment provided by the rule’s differential impact on small and large firms above and below the arbitrary $75 million market capitalization separation. We measure the impact of the market’s frustrated expectation of a permanent exemption for small firms, an expectation stemming from prior SEC implementation of other controversial rules and strong language in the Dodd-Frank Act, against a control group represented by large firms who expected application of the rule and for whom the new rule’s impact was largely capitalized into their value.