Print Archive
We present a simple model of common ownership in which an investor chooses its stake in competing firms in light of the effects on firm behavior and firm profits. Two firms compete in Cournot duopoly, and ownership affects a firm’s objective function in the manner posited by Bresnahan & Salop (1986) and Salop & O’Brien (2000).
If a company misbehaves, lawsuits are one way of providing a remedy and encouraging that company and others to behave in the future. If the misbehavior is securities fraud, there are two potential plaintiffs—traders allegedly injured by the fraud may bring a private suit, and the government (through the SEC or DOJ) may sue to enforce the public interest in truthful disclosures of corporate information. If the misbehavior is violations of corporate governance rules, however, only private suits are available.
This project explores side letters in private market funds. Side letters, separate agreements between a fund and an investor, act as an invisible amendment to the main contract. This article introduces a new use case for side letters: impact investments, where funds target social, as well as financial, returns. Using a hand-collected data set, we examine the scope and role of side letters in this growing space.
Easterbrook and Fischel’s work suggests that society as a whole would achieve the best results if corporate leaders focused only on raising stock prices, leaving other institutions to tend to all other interests. But the idea that making societally important corporations govern to the whims of the stock market would be a win-win for investors, other corporate stakeholders, and our society as a whole has proven incorrect.
A compelling point in The Economic Structure of Corporate Law is that the single goal of maximizing shareholder value is efficient and generally desirable because it gives the managers one aim—while leaving room for law and private contracts to impose constraints on the firm in order to control negative externalities and other social concerns. Easterbrook and Fischel say that: “A manager told to serve two masters (a little for the equity holder, a little for the community) has been freed of both and is answerable to neither.”
This Article examines the perspective on insider trading in Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel’s classic work, The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, comparing it with the perspectives the authors have taken in other work on the topic in which the Book’s authors did not coauthor with each other. While Easterbrook and Fischel have similar conceptions about the meaning of “fairness” in securities regulation and corporate law, their differing assumptions about the efficacy of the contracting process within the corporation explain their disagreements about what insider trading law should look like.
Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel’s comments on corporate purpose are as fresh today as they were when they were first published in the 1980s. Starting from the “contractarian” perspective, they asked a key question about questions such as “what is the goal of the corporation?”, namely, “Who cares?” In this contribution to the symposium volume in their honor, I examine the current corporate purpose debate through the lens of their rather brief comments that first appeared in their 1989 article, “The Corporate Contract.”
Easterbrook and Fischel’s The Economic Structure of Corporate Law advances their now famous passivity thesis, which posits that managers should remain passive in the face of an unsolicited tender offer for the company’s shares. Consistent with the broader Chicago-school economic belief, Easterbrook and Fischel argue that markets are generally efficient, and therefore restrictions on the market (like poison pills) are bad. In doing so, Easterbrook and Fischel also consider and reject externalities that might cause the market for corporate control to not function well.
Should telecommuters who work across states be taxed by the state that they are physically working in? By the state their office is located in? By both? This issue was raised in New Hampshire v. Massachusetts. There, New Hampshire challenged the taxing authority of a Massachusetts rule that taxed New Hampshire residents who had worked within a Massachusetts office prior to COVID-19 related restrictions but were telecommuting from New Hampshire.
This Comment analyzes the history, jurisprudence, and contemporary status of the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign citizens to bring suit in US courts for violations of international law. It attempts to answer two unresolved questions relating to the Alien Tort Statute. First, can domestic corporations be sued under the statue? Based on an analysis of the statute’s text, its history, and lower court decisions, this Comment argues that they rightly should be.
In the aftermath of the GameStop phenomenon in early 2021, there have been increasing calls for expanded mandatory financial disclosures particularly regarding hedge funds and short selling. Efforts to increase disclosure requirements on hedge funds may implicate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. This comment argues that mandatory disclosure of a firm’s total portfolio—its long, short, and derivative positions—constitutes an uncompensated taking of its trade secrets.
Dark patterns are designed to confuse and manipulate users to select the option preferred by website owners. Dark patterns are especially prevalent in cookie consent notices, which are notices that websites display to inquire users regarding their cookie preferences. Cookies are often used by websites to track and store user information for functional and marketing purposes. Dark patterns exploit various psychological biases, and the interaction among the biases will likely exacerbate their effects. This Article examines 100 cookie consent notices from the most popular e-commerce websites in the United States and offers a set of empirical data on the current landscape of dark patterns in cookie consent notices.