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

SEC Enforcement Actions Over Stock Transaction Reporting Obligations

On September 10, 2014, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced an unprecedented enforcement sweep against 34 companies and individuals for alleged failures to timely file with the SEC various Section 16(a) filings (Forms 3, 4 and 5) and Schedules 13D and 13G (the “September 10 actions”). [1] The September 10 actions named 13 corporate officers […]

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SEC Adopts Long Awaited Rules for Asset-Backed Securities

Earlier this week, the SEC adopted significant changes to Regulation AB, which governs the offering process and disclosure and periodic reporting requirements for public offerings of asset-backed securities, including residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS). The revisions to Regulation AB were a long time coming—they were first proposed in 2010 and have drawn several rounds of […]

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Real Effects of Frequent Financial Reporting

In our paper, Real Effects of Frequent Financial Reporting, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine the impact of financial reporting frequency on firms’ investment decisions. Whether increased financial reporting frequency improves or adversely influences a manager’s investments decision is ambiguous. On the one hand, increased transparency through higher reporting frequency can […]

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Delaware Court Finds Two Transactions Not Entirely Fair

On September 4, 2014, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued two lengthy post-trial opinions, [1] both authored by Vice Chancellor John W. Noble, finding that recapitalization or restructuring transactions did not satisfy the entire fairness standard of review. Although plaintiffs in each instance had received a fair price, the court found that the defendants had […]

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Race to the Bottom Recalculated: Scoring Corporate Law Over Time

In The Race to the Bottom Recalculated: Scoring Corporate Law Over Time we undertake a pioneering historically-oriented leximetric analysis of U.S. corporate law to provide insights concerning the evolution of shareholder rights. There have previously been studies seeking to measure the pace of change with U.S. corporate law. Our study, which covers from 1900 to […]

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High-Frequency Trading: An Innovative Solution to Address Key Issues

As controversial as is HFT, the large volume of the discussion sometimes makes it hard to understand the content. What elements of HFT positively impact the trading markets? Which are problematic? What are the proposed mitigations? Therefore, the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute (IRRC Institute) asked Khashanah, Florescu, and Yang (KF&Y) to look at HFT […]

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Window Dressing in Mutual Funds

In our paper, Window Dressing in Mutual Funds, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, we investigate an alleged agency problem in the mutual fund industry. This problem involves fund managers attempting to mislead investors about their true ability by trading in such a manner that they disclose at quarter ends disproportionately higher (lower) holdings […]

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Alibaba’s Governance Risks

Wall Street is eagerly watching what is expected to be one of the largest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history: the offering of the Chinese Internet retailer Alibaba at the end of this week. Investors have been described by the media as “salivating” and “flooding underwriters with orders.” It is important for investors, however, to […]

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The Legal and Practical Implications of Retroactive Legislation Targeting Inversions

The increasing use of corporate inversions, whereby a company via merger achieves 20 percent or more new ownership, claims non-US residence, and is then permitted to adopt that country’s lower corporate tax structure and take advantage of tax base reduction techniques, has been the subject of intense media commentary and political attention. That is perhaps […]

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Measuring Price Impact with Investors’ Forward-Looking Information

The recent Supreme Court decision in Halliburton brought renewed interest to price impact and event studies. Aside from identification and analysis of the news itself, the event study has three basis steps: (i) Estimate a statistical model (or “market model”) of how the stock price would be expected to change in absence of such news […]

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