The National Law Journal recently published Securities Class Actions: Time to Fix Broken System, an opinion piece by defense counsel Daniel Small. The piece explains the rationale underpinning the existence of class actions and focuses on aspects of the system the author regards as broken. The piece is critical of the ability of the first “victim” in the court house to “help decide which [law] firm is lead counsel, help approve settlement and fee agreements and take other important actions.” The author suggests that 1995 amendments designed to minimize the perverse incentives created by the system suffered from a lack of regulatory oversight. The author cites events surrounding the sentencing of Seymour Lazar in support of his critique, but cautions against focusing on the wrongdoing of particular individuals or law firms if this would obscure systemic problems requiring attention.

Mr Small recommends systemic changes to securities class actions, which include the following: limiting the number of times one person (or family) can be a class representative; limiting class representatives to shareholders who satisfy stiffer requirements concerning their shareholding; requiring attorneys to sign the class representative certification; and limiting attorney fees.

The article is available here.

The Program on Corporate Governance has recently released a new discussion paper entitled Perpetuities, Taxes, and Asset Protection: An Empirical Assessment of the Jurisdictional Competition for Trust Funds, which I co-wrote with Max Schanzenbach. The paper abstract is as follows:

This chapter provides an accessible overview of our previous work on the impact of the abolition of the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP) on trust fund situs. The implementation of the Generation Skipping Transfer (GST) Tax by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 sparked a movement to repeal the RAP. Since 1986, nearly half the states have abolished or effectively abolished the RAP as applied to interests in trust. Prior to 1986, only three states had abolished the RAP. We find no evidence that abolishing the RAP prior to the 1986 GST tax attracted trust business. By contrast, between 1986 and 2003, abolishing states reported an average increase in trust assets of $6 billion (a 20 percent increase). In addition, average account size in abolishing states increased by $200,000, implying that abolishing the rule attracted relatively larger trusts. Our findings imply that roughly $100 billion in trust funds have moved to take advantage of the abolition of the RAP. Further, we can trace these results to the subset of abolishing states that did not levy a tax on income accumulated in trusts attracted from out of state. This finding, which implies that abolishing the RAP does not directly increase state tax revenue, bears on the scholarly debate over the mechanisms of jurisdictional competition. Our analysis also controls for whether a state validated the so-called self-settled asset protection trust (APT). We did not find consistent evidence that validating APTs increases a state’s reported trust business, but in the period studied few states had validated APTs, so we draw no firm conclusions.

We conclude that the jurisdictional competition for trust funds is real and intense, with the primary margin of competition being the rules that bear on trust duration, and that the enactment of the GST tax sparked the rise of the perpetual trust. In future work using more refined data, we intend to revisit the jurisdictional competition for trust funds and to expand our inquiry to include directed trustee statutes and the recent reforms to trust-investment laws.

Alon Brav, Wei Jiang and Frank Partnoy and I have recently released a paper, entitled Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance. The abstract is as follows:

Using a large hand-collected data set from 2001 to 2006, we find that activist hedge funds in the U.S. propose strategic, operational, and financial remedies and attain success or partial success in two-thirds of the cases. Hedge funds seldom seek control and in most cases are nonconfrontational. The abnormal return around the announcement of activism is approximately 7%, with no reversal during the subsequent year. Target firms experience increases in payout, operating performance, and higher CEO turnover after activism. Our analysis provides important new evidence on the mechanisms and effects of informed shareholder monitoring.

Together with Iman Anabtawi, I have just issued a new article on SSRN entitled Fiduciary Duties for Activist Shareholders. The article is to be published in the Stanford Law Review, and a current draft is available here. The article was recently profiled in the Financial Times.

Fiduciary Duties for Activist Shareholders argues that corporate law seems to impose few or no fiduciary duties on minority shareholders in public corporations because historically, minority shareholders in public firms enjoyed little or no power or influence within the firm. The most important trend in corporate governance today, however, is the move toward “shareholder democracy.” Activist investors, especially hedge funds, are using their new power to pressure managers and directors into pursuing corporate transactions ranging from share repurchases, to special dividends, to the sale of assets or even the entire firm. In many cases these transactions benefit the activist while failing to benefit, or even harming, the firm and other shareholders.

Greater shareholder power should be coupled with greater shareholder responsibility. Fiduciary Duties for Activist Shareholders argues that the rules of fiduciary duty traditionally applied to officers and directors and, more rarely, to controlling shareholders, should be applied to activist minority investors as well. There is no reason to believe that newly-empowered activist shareholders are immune to the forces of greed and self-interest widely understood to tempt corporate officers and directors. Corporate law can and should adapt to this reality.

(Editor’s note: The post below comes to us from Andriy Bodnaruk of the University of Maastricht, Massimo Massa of INSEAD, and Andrei Simonov of the Stockholm School of Economics and CEPR).

We have recently released a paper, entitled The Dark Role of Investment Banks in the Market for Corporate Control. Our paper studies M&A transactions in the US in the 20 year-period 1984 to 2003. Its focus is on transactions in which the investment bank advising the bidder in an M&A transaction also holds a stake in the shares of the target company at the time the deal was announced. In broad terms, the paper provides evidence as to (1) the extent to which investment banks advising bidders took advantage of confidential information garnered from their advisory assignments to acquire stakes in the target prior to the deal’s announcement; and (2) the extent to which the investment bank’s stake in the target compromised the financial interests of the bank’s bidder client.

We show that the presence of advisors helps to predict if a firm will be a takeover target. Conditioning on firms with similar industry and size characteristics, firms in which the advisors to the bidder hold a stake are 45 percentage points more likely to become targets, with the probability of becoming a target increasing from the unconditional sample mean of 4.2% to 6.1%. When we build the trading strategy long in the actual positions of the advising investment banks and short in the positions of the non-advisory banks, we find the strategy delivers 1.40% per month (adjusted for risk). This provides a lower bound estimate of the informational advantage that the advisory bank has relative to other sophisticated market players.

We further show that where an investment bank advising the bidder holds a stake in the target, the bidder will pay a higher premium for the target relative to deals in which the advisor holds no target stake. The target’s premium increases by 590 basis points from 30.6% to 36.5% relative to non-conflicted deals. An increase of one standard deviation in the (dollar value of the) average fraction of the target firm held by the advisor to the bidder implies a premium 310 (290) basis points higher than average. Deals involving the bidder’s advisor holding a stake in the target are more likely to succeed than other deals. Moreover, targets in these deals tend to be overvalued by more than 10% compared to deals in which the bidder’s advisor holds no target stake.

These findings suggest that advisors do take advantage of their privileged position, not only by acquiring positions in the deals on which they advise, but also by directly affecting the outcome of the deal in order to realize higher capital gains from their positions. These results provide important insights into the conflicts of interest affecting financial intermediaries that can both advise on corporate events and invest in the equity market.

The paper is available here.

Two committees of the American Accounting Association have produced detailed reports evaluating the SEC’s proposal to accept financial statements prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) from foreign-private issuers without reconciliation to U.S. GAAP (the SEC subsequently voted in favor of the proposal on November 15, 2007). This proposal was also discussed by Carl Olson in his November 28 post. These two papers highlight the difficult nature of this issue. Despite the common background of the members of each group and the common academic research utilized in preparing each proposal, the recommendations of the two committees are distinctly different.

The Financial Accounting Standards Committee report (available here) argues that since there is no conclusive research evidence that financial reports prepared using U.S. GAAP are better than reports prepared using IFRS, the prudent approach is to promote competition among them. This finding supports adopting the SEC’s proposal to permit foreign private issuers a choice between IFRS and U.S. GAAP.

The Financial Reporting Policy Committee report (available here) concludes that the proposed elimination of the GAAP reconciliation requirement is premature. This conclusion is based on research that finds that material reconciling items exist that are relevant to U.S. investors, that there are differences in the implementation of uniform standards and that compliance to IFRS or U.S. GAAP by foreign firms is a concern, that foreign firms benefit from greater access to capital by listing in the U.S., that U.S. investors tend to prefer U.S. GAAP, and that U.S. GAAP - IFRS harmonization might improve the functioning of the U.S. capital markets.

(Editor’s Note: The post below comes to us from Jennifer G. Hill of the University of Sydney, Australia, who is Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt Law School during Spring 2008 and 2009.)

I have recently completed a paper, entitled “The Shifting Balance of Power Between Shareholders and the Board: News Corp’s Exodus to Delaware and Other Antipodean Tales”. The paper is posted on SSRN here.

The abstract to the paper is as follows:

The balance of power between shareholders and the board of directors is a contentious issue in current corporate law debate. It also lay at the heart of a controversy concerning the re-incorporation of News Corporation (News Corp) in Delaware. News Corp has recently been the subject of intense media attention due its successful bid to acquire Dow Jones & Company. Nonetheless, News Corp’s move to the US, which paved the way for this victory, was neither smooth nor a fait accompli. Rather, the original 2004 re-incorporation proposal prompted a revolt by a number of institutional investors, on the basis that a move to Delaware would strengthen managerial power vis-à-vis shareholder power. The institutional investors were particularly concerned about the effect of the re-incorporation on shareholder participatory rights, and the ability of the board of directors to adopt anti-takeover mechanisms, such as poison pills, which are not permissible under Australian law. It was this latter concern, which ultimately led a group of institutional investors to commence legal proceedings in the Delaware Chancery Court in UniSuper Ltd v News Corporation (2005 WL 3529317 (Del Ch)).

The News Corp re-incorporation saga highlights a number of important differences between US, UK and Australian corporate law rules relating to shareholder rights, and provides a valuable comparative law counterpoint to the recent US shareholder empowerment debate. Other recent Australian commercial developments discussed in the article show a tension between legal rules designed to enhance shareholder power, and commercial practices designed to readjust power in favor of the board of directors. These developments are interesting because they demonstrate how some Australian companies have tried to create a de facto corporate governance regime, which mimics certain aspects of Delaware law.

I have just posted on SSRN a paper that put forwards a new approach to improving the structure of executives’ equity-based pay arrangements, Hands-Off Options. The current draft is available here.

The abstract is as follows:

Despite recent reforms, public company executives can still use inside information to time their stock sales, secretly boosting their pay. They can also still inflate the stock price before selling. Such insider trading and price manipulation imposes large costs on shareholders. This paper suggests that executives’ options be cashed out according to a pre-specified, gradual schedule. These hands-off options would substantially reduce the costs associated with current equity arrangements while imposing little burden on executives.

As I am continuing to work on this paper and a number of related projects, any comments would be most welcome.

We have just posted a paper on SSRN, Opting Only In: Contractarians, Waiver of Liability Provisions, and the Race to the Bottom, challenging one of the core positions of the contractarian approach to corporate law. Contractarians espouse an enabling approach to regulation allowing corporations to opt in or opt out and oppose a mandatory approach based on categorical rules. In their view, an enabling approach allows private ordering and enables owners and managers to derive the most efficient set of provisions, tailored to each company’s specific circumstances. This position has been reflected in attacks on legislations like SOX. Many commentators objected to its provisions because they were categorical and did not allow for private ordering.

Our study seeks to test this theory’s explanatory power in one area of corporate law. We chose a recent example of states replacing a categorical requirement with an enabling provision - waiver of liability provisions – for examination. These provisions allow companies to “opt out” of a rule that imposes liability on directors for breach of the duty of care. They may do so through the mechanism of an amendment to the articles. The amendment process requires the consent of both owners and managers, presenting conditions ripe, at least in theory, for the two groups to “bargain.”

We note first that waiver of liability provisions were authorized not in response to Van Gorkom, as is typically represented, but in response to the D&O insurance crisis occurring in the 1980s. In other words, the provisions were designed to interfere in the market for insurance. No evidence was offered, nor could we find any, indicating that this was a more efficient way of dealing with the economic uncertainties that existed at the time.

Second, we examined the waiver of liability provisions implemented by the Fortune 100 (data that we will eventually expand to the Fortune 500). Our analysis does not offer any evidence of private ordering. With one exception, all non-mutual companies in the Fortune 100 have eliminated liability for breach of the duty of care (in some states, this was done statutorily, with no company “opting out” of the no liability regime). Moreover, none of the waiver provisions reflected bargaining, with the wording of the provisions being remarkably similar. The companies in our sample waived liability to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Our analysis shows that one categorical rule favoring shareholders (liability for the breach of the duty of care) was replaced by another categorical rule favoring management (no liability for breach of the duty of care). While we do not rule out the possibility, we are not persuaded that any significant evidence demonstrating that one was more efficient than the other exists.

Our conclusion is supported by the fact that no actual bargaining occurs. Particularly where provisions are implemented by an amendment to the articles, it is management that drafts the language and only management that can initiate adoption or repeal. In other words, whatever theoretical benefit can result from the contractarian view of private ordering, it can only arise in practice if shareholders have the ability to meaningfully participate in the bargaining process. Our evidence suggests that they do not.

I have just released a working paper on the measurement of shareholder protection around the world, entitled “’Law and Finance’ Revisited” and available on SSRN here. The abstract is as follows:

The “Antidirector Rights Index” from La Porta et al.’s “Law and Finance” (1998) has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in almost 100 published studies. With articles by legal scholars questioning the accuracy of index values for several countries, I undertake a systematic study to verify these values for 46 countries with the help of local lawyers. My emphasis is on accuracy of the data; I do not change the original variable definitions. The study leads to a substantial revision: 33 of the 46 observations need to be corrected, and the correlation of corrected and original values is only .53. With accurate values, the well-known results of La Porta et al. (1997, 1998) no longer hold: accurate index values are neither distributed with significant differences between Common and Civil Law countries nor correlated with stock market size and ownership dispersion. All of the many results derived with the index will have to be revisited.

(NB: This paper is a revision of Spamann (2006).

By way of background, the cited article “Law and Finance” by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Vishny (1998) started an entire literature of the same name. I have recently described the current state of this literature on this blog here.

Lawdragon magazine presented its third annual list of the “500 Leading Lawyers in America,” and the list includes eight individuals who are affiliated with the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and/or the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog.

The 500 Leading Lawyers list includes professor Lucian Bebchuk (Harvard Law School), who serves as director of the Program, as well as four members of the Program’s advisory board: Peter Atkins (Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom), Theodore Mirvis (Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz), James Morphy (Sullivan & Cromwell), and Eileen Nugent (Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom).

In addition, the 500 Leading Lawyers list includes three guest contributors of the Blog: Jay Eisenhofer (Grant & Eisenhofer), Mark Morton (Potter, Anderson & Corroon), and Charles Nathan (Latham & Watkins).

Lawdragon’s list includes attorneys from private practice, in-house counsel, law professors, judges, government attorneys, and public interest lawyers. Lawdragon bases its selection of the leading lawyers through a combination of online balloting and independent research. Lawdragon’s announcement appears here.

On February 14, the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting presented its interim report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The report includes 12 developed proposals, conceptual approaches representing the Committee’s initial views on matters, and currently identified matters for further consideration. The key themes of the report are the following: increasing emphasis on the investor perspective in the financial reporting system; consolidating the process of setting and interpreting accounting standards; promoting the design of more uniform and principles-based accounting standards; creating a disciplined framework for the increased use of professional judgment; and taking steps to coordinate Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in the US with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Formed by the SEC in July 2007, the Committee was tasked to examine the US financial reporting system and to recommend changes to increase the usefulness of financial information to investors, while reducing the financial reporting system’s complexity. The Committee’s final report is some months away. The Committee includes representatives from the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

The interim report is available here.

I’ve been giving some thought to the dust up last year between Marty Lipton and other governance experts as to whether Pfizer’s initiative of having several of its independent directors meet with its largest institutional investors represented a landmark in the decline of director-centric corporate governance, and have also been thinking about what we mean when we talk about director-centric vs. shareholder-centric governance. The working text of a talk I gave on the subject last week at the Corporate Governance Center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, at the invitation of Joe Carcello and Joan Heminway, is available here. I plan to do some more work on this and turn it into an article later this year. In the meantime, I’d greatly appreciate comments.

Does a Director Qua Director Have Standing to Sue Derivatively? No, so said the Delaware Supreme Court yesterday in Schoon v. Smith. The Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Chancery’s little-noticed ruling last year that dismissed a derivative claim brought by a director against the company’s other directors, including its controlling stockholder. The plaintiff-director, who was not a stockholder of the company, charged his fellow directors with, among other things, breach of fiduciary duty and unjust enrichment. The court held that, notwithstanding the equitable origins of derivative suits, the issue of director standing today is best left to the legislature. “Although the Delaware General Assembly has the prerogative to confer standing upon directors by statute,” the court wrote, “it has not chosen to do so.” Rejecting the American Law Institute Principles that give individual directors standing to sue on behalf of their corporations, the court continued that, “[b]ecause a stockholder derivative action is available to redress any breach of fiduciary duty, we decline to extend the doctrine of equitable standing to allow a director to bring a similar action.” The court concluded, however, by leaving itself a little room to permit directors to bring derivative suits, but only where the failure to do so would result in a “complete failure of justice”—a seemingly high standard.

As a practical matter, the decision is unlikely to have much significance because most directors are also stockholders. But the decision is still significant and may draw criticism with respect to its implications for corporate governance and director duties. In particular, the court noted that the concept of being an “independent director” does not mandate “a duty to sue on behalf of the corporation.”

The opinion is available here.

(Editor’s Note: The post below comes to us from Peter Moon of Universities Superannuation Scheme, Phil Spathis of the Australia Council of Super Investors, and Keith Johnson of Reinhart Institutional Investor Services.)

Verizon, Par Pharmaceutical and Aflac became the first US companies over the last year to adopt policies requiring an advisory vote of shareholders on company executive compensation practices. A network of over 70 institutional and individual investors lead by AFSCME and Walden Asset Management announced in January that adoption of this ’say on pay’ policy is expected to be put on proxies at more than 90 US companies this year. With majority shareholder votes having been cast for similar resolutions at seven companies during 2007, say on pay will be one of the hottest issues in the upcoming US proxy season. In their article, Global Investors Laud Shareholder Votes on Executive Compensation, Peter Moon from the $65 billion Universities Superannuation Scheme pension fund in Britain, Phil Spathis from the $200 billion Australia Council of Super Investors and Keith Johnson from the University of Wisconsin Law School’s International Corporate Governance Initiative describe the impact that say on pay has had in other markets and discuss the benefits it could produce for both companies and shareholders in the United States.

On Monday February 4, HLS Professor John C. Coates IV delivered his inaugural lecture “On Being a Corporate Lawyer” on the occasion of his appointment as the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics.

Coates’ lecture surveyed recent trends in corporate law practice—the field, he said, which continues to draw the majority of graduates of top schools. He noted that the leading corporate law firms have remained relatively stable and free from the kind of volatility seen in the investment banking sector over the past several decades, citing major banks that have vanished or been displaced. But, he said, some important changes are nevertheless on the way. Among them:

Click here for a webcast of this event.

CVS Caremark and I have reached an agreement under which the company adopted a by-law provision limiting the adoption of poison pills. The adopted by-law is based on a shareholder proposal to amend the company’s by-laws that I submitted for the company’s upcoming annual meeting. Following the agreement that the company and I reached, the company’s board adopted the new by-law earlier this week, and I withdrew my shareholder proposal. The amended by-laws of CVS, including the new section 8 of Article VI, were filed yesterday and are available here.

Under the new by-law provision, any extension of a poison pill plan not ratified by the shareholders must be approved by at least 75% of the members of the board of directors, and a pill not so extended will expire one year after its adoption or last such extension.

My shareholder proposal and the by-law adopted by CVS are based on a model by-law that was the subject of litigation and a court decision in the CA case, which led CA to abandon its attempt to exclude my proposal from the corporate ballot. An article about the litigation and my model by-law is available here.

CVS is the third company to adopt a by-law provision based on this model by-law. The adoption by CVS was preceded by an adoption by Disney, which adopted a version of my proposal after the proposal won 57% of the votes in Disney’s annual meeting, as well as an adoption by Bristol-Myers Squibb.

I commend the board of CVS for its adoption of the pill-limiting by-law. I hope that boards of other public companies will follow the example set by the boards of CVS, Disney, and Bristol-Myers and adopt similar by-law provisions.

I would like to thank the law firm of Grant & Eisenhofer for its valuable legal advice and legal representation in connection with my shareholder proposals in general and the pill by-law proposals in particular. I also wish to thank Spotlight Capital Management for advising me on engagement with companies.

I posted previously here on Vice Chancellor Strine’s decision in Mercier v. Inter-Tel (Delaware), Inc., and I continue to believe that it was probably the most important decision issued by the Delaware Court of Chancery in 2007. I recently wrote an article for the Securities Litigation Report discussing Inter-Tel and explaining its potential significance. In particular, Vice Chancellor Strine’s reasonableness standard in reviewing a decision to move a stockholders meeting date — if endorsed by the Delaware Supreme Court — would provide much clarity to practitioners and boards of directors. The decision is also notable for, among other things, its discussion of the roles of ISS and arbitrageurs in influencing merger votes.

The article, which originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of the Securities Litigation Report, is available here and is being reproduced with the permission of Thomson West.

Our firm has recently released a Corporate Governance Commentary providing an overview of the recent proxy rule amendments designed to encourage the use of electronic shareholder forums (for convenience, referred to as “e-forums”). The amendments were hastily adopted at a time when most of the attention was on proxy access. While the amendments were intended to benefit both companies and shareholders, it is activist investors who may be the most significant beneficiaries.

The Commentary, entitled “A Practitioner’s Guide to Electronic Shareholder Forums“, explains how the amendments facilitate the use of e-forums, and what the potential risks and benefits to companies are. It explains that for a lot of companies, e-forums may serve as an additional channel of communication with shareholders for which the companies do not have a pressing need. For companies that do decide to construct or participate in e-forums, the companies will have to be careful that the e-forums are functionally useful and are not used for launching tirades against management. Perhaps more troubling for companies, e-forums will improve the ability of hedge funds and other activist investors to mobilize.

The full Commentary is available online here.

I have just posted a forthcoming Vanderbilt Law Review article on issuer proxy access, Proxy Access in an Era of Increasing Shareholder Power: Forget Issuer Proxy Access and Focus on E-Proxy. The current draft is posted on SSRN here.

The abstract is as follows:

The current debate over shareholder access to the issuer’s proxy for the purpose of making director nomination is both overstated in its importance and misses the serious issue in question. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s new e-proxy rules, which permit reliance on proxy materials posted on a website, should substantially reduce the production and distribution cost differences between a meaningful contest waged via issuer proxy access and a freestanding proxy solicitation. The serious question relates to the appropriate disclosure required of a shareholder nominator no matter which avenue is used. Institutional investors and other shareholder activists should focus their energies on working through the mechanics of waging short-slate proxy contests using e-proxy solicitations.

Activist institutions need to work out the disclosure package required under the existing proxy rules. Such disclosure may be tested (and refined) through litigation, but a standardized package should emerge relatively quickly that the institution could use in proxy contests without a control motive. Institutional investors need to become facile with the e-proxy model (including coordinating a practice for opting-in to web-access) and should appreciate the extent to which proxy advisory services will do much of the actual solicitation work. If institutions are unwilling to make the relatively modest investment to master the mechanics of e-proxy contest, both in their initiation as well as voting in support of them, then their role in corporate governance will necessarily be limited.

With my co-authors Reena Aggarwal (Georgetown), Isil Erel (Ohio State) and Rohan Williamson (Georgetown), I have recently completed a revision of the paper “Differences in Governance Practices between U.S. and Foreign Firms: Measurement, Causes, and Consequences.” The paper is available at SSRN. The paper is now forthcoming at The Review of Financial Studies. The paper shows that foreign firms invest less in firm-level governance and that this lower investment is associated with lower valuations.

Using the well-known definition of Shleifer and Vishny (1997), governance consists of the mechanisms which insure that minority shareholders receive an appropriate return on their investment. Governance depends both on country-level as well as firm-level mechanisms. The country-level governance mechanisms include a country’s laws, its culture and norms, and the institutions which enforce the laws. Firm-level or internal governance mechanisms are those that operate within the firm. Firm-level governance mechanisms that increase the power of minority shareholders to receive a return on their investment are costly, so that the adoption of such mechanisms by a firm is an investment. The payoffs from that investment differ across countries and across firms.

The U.S. is recognized to have extremely high financial and economic development, to have strong investor protection, and to protect property rights well. Consequently, we would expect the internal governance of firms in the U.S. to come as close as possible to what the optimal internal governance of a firm would be in a foreign country if it were not constrained by weaker institutions and lower development than in the U.S. The internal governance of firms in the U.S. therefore provides a benchmark that can be used to evaluate the impact of different institutions and different development from the U.S. on governance choices and, through these choices, on firm value.

On theoretical grounds, it is not clear whether the characteristics of the U.S. make firm-level investment in governance mechanisms that increase the power of minority shareholders more or less advantageous for U.S. firms relative to firms from countries which do not have the same high level of development and investor protection. One possibility is that foreign firms would invest less in firm-level governance if they were in the U.S. because firm-level governance and country-level investor protection are substitutes. An alternative possibility is that investment in firm-level governance is less productive in countries with poor economic development and weak investor protection than it is in the U.S., implying that firm-level governance and investor protection are complements.

We find strong evidence that foreign firms invest less in internal governance mechanisms that increase the power of minority shareholders than comparable U.S. firms do. In other words, investment in firm-level governance is higher when a country becomes more economically and financially developed and better protects investor rights. Further, to the extent that institutional and development weaknesses reduce a foreign firm’s investment in corporate governance compared to a U.S. firm, we would expect the value of the foreign firm to be lower. As expected, we find that the value of foreign firms is negatively related to the magnitude of their governance investment shortfall relative to U.S. firms.

To conduct our investigation, we need information about firm-level corporate governance attributes that increase the power of minority shareholders for a large number of firms across a large number of countries and we would like individual governance attributes to be assessed similarly across all these firms. We use the corporate governance attributes recorded by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). By doing so, we can analyze 44 common governance attributes for 2,234 non-U.S. firms and 5,296 U.S. firms covering 23 developed countries. We create a governance index making sure that the governance attributes included are relevant both for U.S. firms and foreign firms. We call it the GOV Index.

To evaluate the governance a foreign firm would have if it were in the U.S., we use a propensity score matching method in order to match each foreign firm with a comparable U.S. firm. We then show that foreign firms generally have a lower GOV index, so that they give less power to minority shareholders, than if they were U.S. firms. We define the governance gap to be the difference between the governance index of a foreign firm and the governance index of a comparable U.S. firm. A firm with a positive governance gap has a higher value of the GOV index than its matching U.S. firm. Only 12.7% of foreign firms have a positive governance gap. Strikingly, 86.1% of these firms come from Canada and the U.K., so that firms from countries with similar investor protection as in the U.S. are the ones that are the most likely to invest more in governance than comparable U.S. firms. Such a result is inconsistent with the hypothesis that investor protection and internal governance mechanisms are substitutes.

Having compared the governance of foreign and U.S. firms, we turn to the question of whether the governance gap helps explain a firm’s valuation. We find that the value of foreign firms is increasing in their GOV index. More importantly, perhaps, the lower the GOV index of a foreign firm compared to its matching U.S. firm, the lower the value of that foreign firm. We find that this result holds controlling for firm characteristics known to affect q and controlling for the endogeneity of the choice of governance mechanisms.

If firm-level governance is more costly for foreign firms than for U.S. firms, we expect that the foreign firms comparable to the U.S. firms that benefit the most from investing in internal governance will find it optimal to invest less in governance than matching U.S. firms do and will suffer a loss of value as a result. We can therefore use regression analysis to investigate whether a foreign firm’s q is negatively related to the governance index value it would have in the U.S. We find that this is the case. Such a coefficient is not subject to an endogeneity bias because we are measuring the governance of a U.S. firm and the valuation of a foreign firm.

In addition to investigating the value relevance of differences in the aggregate governance index between foreign firms and comparable U.S. firms, we also consider the value relevance of specific governance provisions. We focus on provisions that have attracted considerable attention in the literature and among policymakers. We find that firms that have an independent board, auditors that are ratified annually, and an audit committee comprised solely of outsiders, have a higher value when their U.S. matching firm has these governance attributes. In contrast, neither board size nor separation of the chairman and CEO functions are value relevant.

As indicated in a recent Harvard Law School announcement, statistics released by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) indicate that, as of the end of 2007, the works of Harvard Law School’s corporate governance scholar Lucian Bebchuk have been downloaded more than the work of any other law professor. His papers have attracted a total of more than 80,000 downloads.

SSRN is the leading electronic service for social science research, and its electronic library contains over 171,000 full-text documents by more than 85,000 authors.

The five works by Bebchuk that have attracted the largest number of total downloads were: What Matters in Corporate Governance? (8093 downloads), The Case for Increasing Shareholder Power (3827 downloads), A Theory of Path Dependence in Corporate Ownership and Governance (3517 downloads), Executive Compensation as an Agency Problem (3336 downloads), and Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in the Design of Executive Compensation (2980 downloads).

The group of the top 100 law professors, based on the total number of downloads of their work, includes three additional HLS faculty working in the corporate area: Reinier Kraakman (13), Mark Roe (32), and Allen Ferrell (41). The Top 100 group also includes senior research fellow Alma Cohen (40) and visiting professor Jesse Fried (23).

For the subset of the 350 companies that were both reviewed by the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance as part of the executive compensation review project and have received one of these “all clear” letters from the Staff, you will soon find the SEC comment letter and the company response posted on the SEC’s EDGAR system. It looks like the Staff hung pretty close to the timeline of “45 days since the Staff started informing companies that they were clear,” which is earliest that the Staff can post letters/responses pursuant to its own policy (which was confirmed in the Staff Observations in the Review of Executive Compensation Disclosure). I just took a cursory swing through the SEC’s database over the weekend and found these:

- Allstate - comment letter and response

- Bristol Myers - comment letter and response

- Berkshire Hathaway - comment letter and response

- Travelers Companies - comment letter and response

There’s about 50 more out there and we’ve posted a more comprehensive list on CompensationStandards.com in a new “SEC Comments” Practice Area. Hopefully, somebody can prove me wrong - but it’s quite challenging to run searches on the SEC’s comment letter database - as well as the third-party providers’ databases - to find these letters. The good ole boolean-type searches don’t seem to work for these particular batch of letters…

(Editor’s Note I: As the hit counter on the right hand side of this blog indicates, our Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog crossed the 1-million-hits mark this past weekend. We express our appreciation to all contributors and to our readers.)

(Editor’s Note II: The post below comes to us from Byron Georgiou and Joseph D. Daley at Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP.)

On Thursday, January 17, a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel led by Judge Richard A. Posner handed down the Circuit’s second crack at the “strong inference” standard in the Tellabs matter. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd. v. Tellabs, Inc., __ F.3d __, No. 04-1687, 2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 975 (7th Cir. Jan. 17, 2008). This latest Tellabs opinion (“Tellabs II”) arose out of a “comeback” case for the Seventh Circuit, following the United States Supreme Court’s June 2007 rejection of the Circuit’s initial attempt to divine the Securities Exchange Act of 1934’s “strong inference” of scienter requirement, as amended by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (“PSLRA”). See Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd., ___ U.S. ___, 127 S. Ct. 2499 (2007) (vacating and remanding Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd. v. Tellabs, Inc. (“Tellabs I”), 437 F.3d 588 (7th Cir. 2006)).

By way of background, the Tellabs saga involved a manufacturer of specialized fiber-optic equipment which, along with several of its top officers, was accused of securities fraud by investors. After repeatedly providing optimistic reassurances in late 2000/early 2001 about the company’s financials, projected revenues/earnings, and demand for its main products, the bombshell, contradictory truth burst in mid-2001: the fiber-optics bubble had already burst in the prior year, purported demand for Tellabs’s core products was actually a sham, and the company’s revenues and profits were plummeting. Not surprisingly, Tellabs stock fell from its class-period peak of $67 to just under $16, and outraged investors filed suit.

Following the district court’s dismissal of the investors’ securities-fraud complaint, the Seventh Circuit reversed in part and held that the investors had met the “strong inference” of scienter standard by alleging facts “from which, if true, a reasonable person could infer that the defendant acted with the requisite intent.” (While stating that holding, the Seventh Circuit explicitly rejected a more-stringent standard that had been adopted by the Sixth Circuit – i.e., that plaintiffs’ inferences had to be more plausible than any competing inferences. Cf. Fidel v. Farley, 392 F.3d 220, 227 (6th Cir. 2004) (PSLRA’s heightened pleading requirements mean that “‘plaintiffs are entitled only to the most plausible of competing inferences’”)).

Granting certiorari, the Supreme Court rejected both views: While the scienter inferences in plaintiffs’ favor need not be irrefutable, or even the most plausible of competing inferences, nor will they suffice if merely “‘reasonable’ or ‘permissible.’” Plaintiffs satisfied the PSLRA’s strong-inference requirement “only if a reasonable person would deem the inference of scienter cogent and at least as compelling as any opposing inference one could draw from the facts alleged.”

On remand to the Seventh Circuit, the Tellabs II panel applied the Supreme Court’s newly enunciated standard. Judge Posner’s opinion is wide-ranging, to be sure, but within its wide expanse there are several gems that are sure to provoke a flurry of supplemental briefing in securities-fraud cases around the country. (Oddly, on the case’s remand the Tellabs II panel was composed of just two of three Circuit judges from Tellabs I; Judge Posner replaced Judge Ripple.) In no particular order, here are several – albeit not all – of the conclusions that Tellabs II reaches concerning strong-inference factors:

…continue reading: Tellabs redux

(Editor’s Note: This post comes to us from Lesley Rosenthal of Lincoln Center.)

The recent governance crisis at the Smithsonian Institution came about through a toxic combination of unchecked arrogance by the CEO, a relatively disengaged Board, and a dysfunctional system of checks and balances. The Smithsonian appointed an independent review committee to take an unflinching look at corporate governance practices there. “How Not to Govern,” which was published in the New York State Bar Journal (Nov/Dec 2007) by Lincoln Center’s General Counsel Lesley Friedman Rosenthal (HLS ‘89), discusses the independent committee’s findings and explores the lessons that may be learned by others in the sector, including chief executives, General Counsel, Corporate Secretaries, board members, outside attorneys, and scholars.

(Editor’s Note: This post comes to us from J.W. Verret.)

(The text of this post summarizes the author’s analysis from an article titled Dr. Jones and the Raiders of Lost Capital: Hedge Fund Regulation Part II, A Self-Regulation Proposal, which will be published in volume 3 (2007) of the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law.)

In 2003, The Securities Exchange Commission instituted a regulation requiring certain hedge funds, previously unregulated, to register as Investment Advisers. That regulation would have meant that funds would have become subject to an intense compliance inspection program. The SEC’s stated goals in instituting this proposal were to minimize instances of fraud perpetrated by hedge funds. Critics of hedge fund registration, such as former Fed Chairman Greenspan, urged that over-regulating hedge funds could mean stifling the liquidity that these funds bring to the securities markets. Other critics argued that hedge funds may have simply moved offshore to avoid the regulation. In the summer of 2006, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals invalidated the 2004 registration provision in Goldstein v. SEC. Since that time, the House Committee on Financial Services, chaired by Rep. Barney Frank, has held hearings into hedge fund regulation. The Administration has announced its intention not to support a further regulatory effort. Though the branches of government are currently at odds, this issue is not likely to go away, especially if Congress and the Executive branch are controlled by the Democratic Party after the ‘08 elections.

In the last ten years, nearly 2 trillion investment dollars have flowed into an industry that found itself at the center of a mutual fund fraud investigation in 2004 and now has a starring role in the subprime lending crisis. Anticipating future regulatory efforts, this article intends to design a regulatory scheme that is more effective and less costly than the SEC’s invalidated registration requirement to provide regulators with an alternative to satiate the desire to “do something” in response to eventual interest group pressure. Self-Regulation is a prominent theme in our capital markets. The NASD and NYSE, now merged to form the FINRA, have long regulated member firms and broker dealers. The Federal Reserve is effectively a quasi Self-Regulatory Organization (”SRO”), with member banks nominating the Regional Presidents. One wonders why the idea of self-regulation in the hedge fund industry has not been previously explored as a viable compromise between the existing extreme views on this topic. Bureaucratic regulators are notoriously slow to innovate their approach, especially when compared to the pace of change in the financial markets, but self-regulators are closer to the front lines. In addition, self-regulatory entities are more sensitive to compliance costs. Even in choosing between equally effective regimes, bureaucratic regulators may, however, have incentives other than cost in mind due to heuristic bias that overemphasizes the risk of scandal or the budgetary allocations that come with enhanced regulatory power.

Economic competition theory also supports self-regulation, as a properly structured SRO creates internal competition among market players which results in decision outcomes that are preferential to direct government oversight. A prisoner’s dilemma can result from the regulation game facing the SRO rulemaking body, in which funds would seek to take capital investments from competitors by voting within the SRO for regulations that enhance transparency of a fund’s fiduciary compliance, out of an interest in taking capital flows from competitors who may not. The result is an equilibrium of compliance that could exceed the level of transparency that would exist without the collective action, thus giving more sharpness and binding effect to any best practices that may exist in the industry and providing a more cost effective enforcement avenue for those best practices. The beauty of this approach is that, unlike the SEC, the SRO internalizes the cost of the regulation. The payoffs to decisions on voting for disclosure regulation are based on revealing things of value to hedge fund investors, so the SRO only increases regulatory cost up to the point at which the new regulation is of such a large marginal value to hedge fund investors that they are likely to decide to switch funds if their fund is revealed as being non-compliant.

…continue reading: A Self Regulation Proposal for the Hedge Fund Industry

(Editor’s Note: This post comes to us from Holly J. Gregory and Ira M. Millstein of Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.)

We have just released our annual memo identifying areas for focus by corporate governance participants in the coming year: “Rethinking Board and Shareholder Engagement in 2008″ (co-authored with our colleague Rebecca C. Grapsas). In the memo, we predict — and encourage — increased efforts by boards of directors to engage shareholders in less contentious, more cooperative interaction and communication. While we salute shareholder activism’s stimulus for rebalancing corporate power in the past twenty years, we caution that the forces for change should abate once an appropriate balance is achieved, or a new imbalance will result. Boards are well-advised to be open to shareholder communications on topics that bear on board quality and attention to shareholder value, communications that are likely to improve mutual understanding and avoid needless confrontation.

At the same time, shareholders have the responsibility to act as concerned and rational owners who make decisions based on knowledge of the nuances; who avoid rigid, box-ticking methods of judging good governance; who don’t abdicate to proxy advisors their responsibility to use judgment; and who avoid activism for activism’s sake. In this spirit, we lay out good practices of board-shareholder engagement in the areas of (1) board composition and independent leadership, (2) corporate performance disclosures, (3) executive performance, compensation and succession, (4) strategic direction, and (5) societal concerns, including climate change and other issues. Finally, we suggest that it may be time for a dialogue on the limits of shareholder power. The full text of the memo is available here.

a) The Supreme Court’s Stoneridge decision has received a lot of attention. On this blog, it was summarized here and commented on here. For those who know this Court and who heard the oral argument, the decision is unsurprising. Justice Kennedy’s opinion, however, is broader than necessary to reach the result. He is telling the lower courts, ‘Don’t mess with my Central Bank decision. Most of us up here don’t like implied private rights of action and we’re not going to let the lower courts find ways to expand them.’

Kennedy’s opinion does give plaintiffs some hope. Following the Solicitor General’s brief, the Court does say that non-verbal conduct can be fraud and thus “a wink and a nod” can still get secondary actors in trouble. What is clear is that this Court, like many thoughtful academics, has become highly skeptical of the honesty, cost effectiveness and real value to investors of our class action litigation system. The greed and sleazy ethics of some of the “private attorneys general” of the plaintiffs bar have put the whole class action system in disrepute. A majority of living former SEC Chairmen and a number of other former Commissioners and former academics had filed an amicus curiae brief in the case supporting the decision reached by the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The brief was prepared by colleagues of mine, whose summary of the case can be found here.

b) I’m also posting another too little noticed speech by Cox, delivered a month ago in Washington, in which he discusses the growing concerns with the role of sovereign wealth funds and government-affiliated public companies in global securities markets and the impact of such government-related concentrations of capital, and related market influence, on corporate ethics and policy, transparency and the integrity of financial reporting. What about the values of corporate governance, and shareholder power, when the controlling interest or “golden share” is held by a government, particularly a government that itself does not practice transparency or tolerate democracy as we know it?

This post is a call for papers for the annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association. The meeting, which is expected to include at least 8 sessions on subjects in the corporate field, will take place this spring at Columbia Law School on May 16-17, 2008. The meeting will bring together researchers from law schools, economics departments, business schools, and elsewhere to present and discuss current projects on a wide range of topics in the field of law and economics. The conference is expected to have two or more sessions in each of the following areas of the corporate field: Corporate Law and Corporate Governance: Policy and Theory; Corporate Law and Corporate Governance: Empirical; Corporate and Securities Law: Comparative and International; and Securities Regulation, Financial Institutions, and Capital Markets Regulation.

Authors are invited to submit their papers electronically at the Association’s website. This website also includes further information about the submission process and the meeting, as well as about prior meetings of the Association. The deadline for submission of papers is Monday, January 28, 2008. For readers interested in attending the meeting, we will post the program in several weeks.

(Editor’s note: We have already posted a summary of the decision here.)

By now the holding in Stoneridge has become well known and widely discussed, including on my site, The Race to the Bottom.    The five justices concluded that Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 did not extend to vendors.  In reading the opinion, the analysis is reminiscent of Bush v. Gore, a decision that is better understood as a political rather than a legal statement.  

The majority was mostly influenced by its view of the appropriate method of enforcing the securities laws.  In the majority’s view, there is no real room for private enforcement, at least under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5.  Lacking the temerity (and the votes, no doubt) to eliminate the cause of action altogether, the Court simply announced that the guiding principle for interpreting the antifraud provisions would be no “expansion.”

As a practical matter, that means that common law principles will not control.  See Stoneridge, at 11 (“Section 10(b) does not incorporate common-law fraud into federal law.”).  Similarly, the intent of Congress doesn’t matter.  As Justice Scalia is often quick to point out, the best way to discern congressional intent is through textual analysis of the statute.  But other than quoting the statute at the beginning of the legal analysis, the Court engaged in no meaningful effort to make the opinion turn on the language of Section 10(b). 

Then what was the basis for the decision?  “Concerns with judicial creation of a private cause of action caution against its expansion.”  Note the passive nature of the sentence.  Who is concerned?  For purposes of statutory construction, the only one whose concern matters is Congress.  But in fact the authority cited by the majority for the proposition is an isolated sentence from Virginia Bancshares that makes the unremarkable point that “as a general matter” an action under the antifraud provision shouldn’t “grow beyond the scope congressionally intended”.  In other words, the Court cited no authority for the proposition and certainly didn’t demonstrate that the “concerns” emanated from Congress. 

This is because the “concerns” are those not of Congress but of the majority on the Supreme Court.  Legislation by the Court, in other words.  The Court’s legislative efforts to restrict private law suits will have consequences, most likely pushing enforcement away from the civil arena to the criminal authorities.  See Stoneridge, at 15 (”Secondary actors are subject to criminal penalties”.)  But that is a topic for another day. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its long awaited decision in Stoneridge Investment Partners, LLC v. Scientific-Atlanta, Inc., 552 U.S. __ (2008). The decision affirms the Supreme Court’s tendency to limit implied rights of action under the securities laws. Specifically, the Supreme Court rejected the concept of “scheme liability” and refused to grant a private right of action against third parties for entering into transactions with the issuer even if they knew that the issuer’s accounting treatment of these transactions would be fraudulent. Some of my partners have prepared a short summary of the decision, which is available here.