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

Risk and The Chief Legal Officer: Expanding Exposure

My firm has prepared a memo entitled “Risk and The Chief Legal Officer: Expanding Exposure,” which addresses what we believe is expanding exposure facing Chief Legal Offices (CLOs) of US public companies. The first two sections briefly address the two key underpinnings of this phenomenon: (1) increasing focus on the CLO as a central player […]

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Executive Compensation: What Obama’s Plan Means

Editor’s Note: This article was recently published by the author, Ben Heineman, in Business Week. Mr. Heineman is General Electric’s former senior vice-president for law and public affairs, and is author of “High Performance with High Integrity”. The Administration’s attempt to deal with excessive pay is more about procedure than substance and will allow most […]

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Back to Purchasing Troubled Assets

Editor’s Note: This post is by Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School. The plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson last September focused on the government’s purchasing “troubled assets” from banks and other financial institutions. Critics (including myself) stressed the huge difficulties that would be involved in the government’s placing a value on troubled assets and […]

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Posted in Executive Compensation, Financial Crisis, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Op-Eds & Opinions | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Moral Hazard and Managerial Compensation

In our recently accepted American Economic Review paper entitled Has Moral Hazard Become a More Important Factor in Managerial Compensation? we estimate a model of moral hazard with data spanning a sixty-year period in order to investigate how well two specific channels explain secular changes in managerial compensation and to assess their relative importance. First, […]

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More on the Administration’s Compensation Guidelines

Related to the recent op-ed piece from Professor Bebchuk regarding the new Treasury executive guidelines, here are key fixes to those new guidelines recommended by Jesse Brill, Chair of CompensationStandards.com: One key aspect of the Obama Adminstration’s new $500,000 cap that has not gotten sufficient attention is the unlimited amount of restricted stock and stock […]

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Posted in Executive Compensation, Practitioner Publications, Securities Regulation | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Reactions to Bebchuk on the Administration’s Compensation Guidelines

In response to Lucian Bebchuk’s post from yesterday, Bernard Sharfman writes: I also agree that the proposed salary caps are mainly symbolic. In 2008, Wall Street paid out $18.4 billion in bonuses to its approximately 164K plus employees. Based on this data and the limited number of firms and number of employees (5 per firm) […]

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The Administration’s Executive Pay Guidelines

Editor’s Note: This post is based on an op-ed piece by Lucian Bebchuk in today’s Wall Street Journal. Critics of the administration’s proposed guidelines on executive compensation say they are a dangerous intrusion into corporate boards’ authority and would make it difficult for financial firms to fill executive positions. These criticisms are unwarranted. If anything, […]

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Posted in Executive Compensation, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Op-Eds & Opinions | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

SEC vs. Mark Cuban

I have recently filed an amicus brief on behalf of myself and Professor Bainbridge of the UCLA Law School, Professor Jonathan Macey of Yale Law School, Professor Alan Bromberg of SMU Law School and Professor Henderson of the University of Chicago Law School in the litigation filed against Mark Cuban by the SEC in the […]

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Posted in Court Cases, HLS Research, Practitioner Publications, Securities Litigation & Enforcement | Tagged , | 3 Comments

SEC Publishes Final Rules for Credit Rating Agencies

On February 2, 2009 the Securities and Exchange Commission published the text of its new rules for credit rating agencies registered as nationally recognized statistical rating organizations (NRSROs). These rules were adopted at the SEC’s December 3, 2008 open meeting. The new rules are generally scheduled to go into effect on April 10, 2009. The […]

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The Financial Crisis and the Future of Financial Regulation

It is stating the obvious to say that over the last 18 months, and even more so the last four, the world financial system – and particularly but not exclusively the world banking system – has suffered a crisis as bad as any since the stock market crashes of 1929 and the various banking crises […]

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Posted in Financial Regulation, International Corporate Governance & Regulation, Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Practitioner Publications | Tagged , | 1 Comment