Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation

The North Dakota Experiment

Editor’s Note: This post is by Larry Ribstein of the University of Illinois College of Law. Last week the North Dakota Legislature adopted the North Dakota Publicly Traded Corporations Act.  To quote the Act’s sponsor, the North Dakota Corporate Governance Council, the Act “provides a governance structure for publicly traded corporations that gives shareholders greater […]

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Posted in Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Op-Eds & Opinions | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Receiving Emailed Updates on Our Posts

Several readers have inquired as to whether we could arrange to notify you by email when one of our contributors has added something new. We’ve now arranged for FeedBlitz to update our readers by email each time we’ve added a new post. The service is simple, free, and easy to use. If you’d like to […]

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An Inconvenient Location for the Annual Shareholders’ Meeting

As most proxy season observers know, one of the oldest tricks in the book for defusing angry shareholders is to hold the annual stockholders’ meeting in some far-flung location, as noted in this recent Wall Street Journal article.  I’ve blogged about this topic once in a blue moon (or left comments on other blogs). With the growing […]

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Does Political Stability Lead to Financial Development?

At last week’s Law and Economics Seminar, Mark Roe presented a fascinating new paper (coauthored with Jordan I. Siegel) called Political Instability and Financial Development.  Unlike previous work, which largely attributes financial development to legal origin, Professors Roe and Siegel argue that political stability, at least in part, explains differences in development across countries.  The Abstract […]

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Posted in Academic Research, HLS Research, International Corporate Governance & Regulation | Tagged , | Comments Off on Does Political Stability Lead to Financial Development?

A Corporate Governance Gadfly

Fortune magazine has an article about Lucian Bebchuk in its current issue. The article, by Geoffrey Colvin, Fortune’s senior editor at large, discusses both Bebchuk’s bylaws initiative and his academic work. Below is the profile: A Corporate Governance Gadfly Irks CEOs: Lucian Bebchuk’s Shareholder Initiatives are Shaking Corporations. by Geoff Colvin He insists he isn’t […]

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Posted in Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, Executive Compensation, Practitioner Publications, Program News & Events | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on A Corporate Governance Gadfly

AIG Agrees to Amend its Bylaws

Editor’s Note: This post is by Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School. American International Group (AIG) and I have reached an agreement under which the company will amend its bylaws to require that CEO compensation be ratified by a majority of independent directors. Last December I submitted a shareholder proposal to amend AIG’s bylaws. Under […]

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Posted in Corporate Elections & Voting, Executive Compensation, Program News & Events | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Jonathan Macey and SOX

Editor’s Note: This post is by J. Robert Brown, Jr. of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Macey (deputy dean at Yale Law School) embarked on an assault on SOX in an article entitled What Sarbox Wrought.  He describes the Act as an […]

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Posted in Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Op-Eds & Opinions, Securities Regulation | Tagged , | 2 Comments

SEC Chairman Cox Expounds on CD&A and Plain English

Editor’s Note: This post is by Broc Romanek of TheCorporateCounsel.net. A few weeks ago, I blogged about SEC Chairman’s Cox‘s first comments on incoming executive compensation disclosures under the new disclosure rules.  Chairman Cox recently gave another speech further explaining why he believes that executive compensation disclosure, and particularly the CD&A, is not in plain English.  The […]

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Posted in Accounting & Disclosure, Boards of Directors, Executive Compensation, Securities Regulation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A Lobbying Approach to Evaluating SOX

Yael Hochberg, Paola Sapienza, and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen have a new study, A Lobbying Approach to Evaluating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, that pursues a novel and interesting approach to assessing SOX.  The Abstract of the paper is as follows: We evaluate the net benefits of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) for shareholders by studying the lobbying […]

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Posted in Academic Research, Empirical Research, Securities Regulation | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

A “Valeant” Effort

Editor’s Note: This post is by Lawrence A. Hamermesh of the Widener University School of Law. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here. On March 1st, Vice Chancellor Lamb made a significant contribution […]

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Posted in Boards of Directors, Court Cases, Executive Compensation, Legislative & Regulatory Developments | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment