-
Supported By:
Subscribe or Follow
HLS Faculty & Senior Fellows
Program on Corporate Governance Advisory Board
- Peter Atkins
- David Bell
- Kerry E. Berchem
- Richard Brand
- Daniel Burch
- Paul Choi
- Jesse Cohn
- Arthur B. Crozier
- Renata J. Ferrari
- Andrew Freedman
- Ray Garcia
- Joseph Hall
- Jason M. Halper William P. Mills
- David Millstone
- Theodore Mirvis
- Philip Richter
- Elina Tetelbaum
- Sebastian Tiller
- Marc Trevino
- Steven J. Williams
Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
Flaws in the AIG Trust
Editor’s Note: This post is by J.W. Verret of the George Mason University School of Law. I had the opportunity to testify before the House Oversight Committee recently on a panel along with Ed Liddy, the CEO of AIG, and the three trustees nominated by the Federal Reserve to manage the government’s $180 billion investment […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Financial Crisis, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Securities Regulation
Tagged AIG, Fiduciary duties, TARP, Treasury Department
Comments Off on Flaws in the AIG Trust
Electing Directors
Shareholder representation by the board of directors is a fundamental component of corporate governance. A great deal of research has focused on the characteristics of corporate boards, yet we know little about uncontested director elections. The subject is particularly important in today’s environment. Congress, stock exchanges, and individual firms have instituted dramatic governance changes. Moreover, […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Academic Research, Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, Corporate Social Responsibility, Empirical Research
Tagged Compensation committees, Director nominations, Executive turnover, Shareholder elections
Comments Off on Electing Directors
Compensation Structure and Systemic Risk
Editor’s Note: This post is the written testimony (with footnotes and appendix omitted) submitted by Professor Lucian Bebchuk to the Committee on Financial Services, United States House of Representatives. Professor Bebchuk will be testifying today in the hearing on “Compensation Structure and Systemic Risk.” The hearing will begin today at 10a.m., and information about it […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Executive Compensation, Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, HLS Research, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Speeches & Testimony
Tagged Equity-based compensation, Executive Compensation, Incentives, Systemic risk
Comments Off on Compensation Structure and Systemic Risk
Putting Investors First in Regulatory Reform
Editor’s Note: The post below by Commissioner Aguilar is a transcript of remarks by him at the Compliance Week Annual Conference on June 3, 2009 in Washington, D.C. I am honored to be speaking to a room full of people who spend their days building a culture of compliance. As a former general counsel of […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, Regulators Materials, Securities Regulation, Speeches & Testimony
Tagged Financial crisis, Financial reform, SEC, Systemic risk
Comments Off on Putting Investors First in Regulatory Reform
Proposed Changes to Regulation of OTC Derivatives and CDSs
Recently, the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman and Subcommittee Chairman Edward J. Markey introduced H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (the “Waxman-Markey Bill” or the “Bill”). The Energy and Commerce Committee approved the Bill on May 21, 2009. Eight other House panels, including Financial Services, have […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Practitioner Publications, Securities Regulation
Tagged CFTC, Credit default swaps, OTC derivatives
Comments Off on Proposed Changes to Regulation of OTC Derivatives and CDSs
Regulating Bankers’ Pay
The program on corporate governance just issued our discussion paper, Regulating Bankers’ Pay, and it is available here. The paper seeks to contribute to understanding the role of executive compensation as a possible cause of the current financial crisis, to assessing current legislative and regulatory attempts to discourage bank executives from taking excessive risks, and […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Academic Research, Banking & Financial Institutions, Executive Compensation, Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, HLS Research
Tagged Banker bonuses, Banks, Executive Compensation, Financial regulation, TARP
Comments Off on Regulating Bankers’ Pay
Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening?
A central question surrounding the subprime crisis is whether the securitization process reduced the incentives of financial intermediaries to carefully screen borrowers. In our forthcoming Quarterly Journal of Economics paper Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence From Subprime Loans, we empirically examine this issue using a unique dataset on securitized subprime mortgage loan contracts […]
Click here to read the complete postCorporate Governance Update: The Forecast On Earnings Guidance
Over the past few years, an increasing number of U.S. public companies have discontinued or modified the practice of issuing quarterly earnings-per-share (EPS) guidance and, in the current financial crisis, this trend has accelerated. A recent survey of 1,300 chief financial officers concluded that “the struggle to produce accurate forecasts now tops the list of […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Accounting & Disclosure, Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Earnings management
Comments Off on Corporate Governance Update: The Forecast On Earnings Guidance
Forum Contributors among the American Lawyer’s Dealmakers of the Year
American Lawyer Magazine recently released its list of the 25 Dealmakers of the Year. Available here, the list identifies individual lawyers who played leading roles in seminal transactions in 2008 that have helped shape the financial regulatory landscape. The list includes four individuals who are contributors to our Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation. […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Mergers & Acquisitions, Program News & Events
Tagged Program on Corporate Governance
Comments Off on Forum Contributors among the American Lawyer’s Dealmakers of the Year
Does corporate governance matter in competitive industries?
We examine whether corporate governance has a different effect on a firm’s operating performance in competitive and non-competitive industries in our forthcoming Journal of Financial Economics paper entitled Does corporate governance matter in competitive industries? We use exogenous variation in corporate governance in the form of 30 business combination (BC) laws passed between 1985 and […]
Click here to read the complete post