Fall 2018

September 24th, 2018 (Monday) at 12:10 PM

Brian Cheffins

• Professor, Cambridge University Law Faculty

Location: 

Jerome Greene Hall, room 807

Topic:  

The Public Company Transformed (forthcoming publication by Oxford University Press)   

Abstract: 

For decades, the public company has played a dominant role in the American economy. Since the middle of the 20th century, the nature of the public company has changed considerably. The transformation has been a fascinating one, marked by scandals, political controversy, wide swings in investor and public sentiment, mismanagement, entrepreneurial verve, noisy corporate “raiders” and various other larger-than-life personalities. Nevertheless, amidst a voluminous literature on corporations, a systematic historical analysis of the changes that have occurred is lacking.The Public Company Transformed correspondingly analyzes how the public company has been recast from the mid-20th century through to the present day, with particular emphasis on senior corporate executives and the constraints affecting the choices available to them.

The Public Company Transformed’s chronological point of departure is the managerial capitalism era, which prevailed in large American corporations following World War II. The book explores managerial capitalism’s rise, its 1950s and 1960s heyday, and its fall in the 1970s and 1980s. The book goes on to describe prosperity American public companies and executives enjoyed during the 1990s and a reversal of fortunes in the 2000s precipitated by corporate scandals and the financial crisis of 2008. Topics canvassed include company boards, shareholder activism, chief executive pay, regulatory trends and concerns about oligopoly. The volume concludes by offering conjectures on the future of the public corporation, and suggests that, despite pessimistic predictions to the contrary, the public company is destined to remain a crucial economic actor.

October 22nd, 2018 (Monday) at 12:10 PM

Joel Seligman

• Professor and Former President, University of Rochester
• Scholar in Residence, Columbia Law School (2018 - 2019)

Location: 

Jerome Greene Hall, room 807

Topic: 

Misalignment:  The New Financial Order and the Failure of Financial Regulation
(Preface to forthcoming book)

Preface excerpt: 

In The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modem Corporate Finance (3d ed. Aspen 2003), I wrote a history of the SEC from 1929-1933 stock market crash until the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002.

Misalignment: The New Financial Order and the Failure of Regulation is the successor to Transformation which carries the story of financial regulation forward in the broader account of banking insurance and securities regulation before and after the 2007 2009 financial crisis. 

Misalignment necessarily involves a Tolstoyian narrative to capture the full sweep of why our financial and economic systems melted down during 2007-2009 and not only involves a detailed examination of what happened during those years, but more importantly, why our $30 trillion financial system proved so unexpectedly fragile.  This is a story that reaches back to the formation of our banking, securities, insurance and housing regulatory systems, a story of well-intended regulation, typically designed to address specific industry crises, being utterly overwhelmed by a global crisis.

October 31st, 2018 (Wednesday) at 12:10 PM

Joshua Mitts

• Associate Professor, Columbia Law School

Location: 

Jerome Greene Hall, room 807

Topic: 

Short and Distort

Abstract: 

Pseudonymous attacks on public companies are followed by stock price declines and sharp reversals. I find these patterns are likely driven by manipulative stock options trading by pseudonymous authors. Among 1,720 pseudonymous attacks on mid- and large-cap firms from 2010-2017, I identify over $20.1 billion of mispricing. Reputation theory suggests these reversals persist because pseudonymity allows manipulators to switch identities without accountability. Using stylometric analysis, I show that pseudonymous authors exploit the perception that they are trustworthy, only to switch identities after losing credibility with the market.

November 26th, 2018 (Monday) at 12:10 PM

Eric Talley

• Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law
• Co-Director, Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership

Location: 

Jerome Greene Hall, room 807

Topic: 

Corporate Climate: Using Machine Learning to assess Climate Risk Disclosures and Susceptibility

Authors: 

Eric Talley & Julian Nyarko

Abstract: 

A decade ago, the SEC instructed issuers to disclose material climate-related risks to their investors on a routine basis. Nevertheless, in the years since there has not emerged a standardized way to make/detect such disclosures, nor is there a good way for assessing what issuers should be making them. This project takes a stab at both tasks, with the assistance of text analysis and machine learning techniques. We first utilize supervised learning techniques to train an algorithmic classifier on SEC documents to detect a bona fide climate risk disclosures.  Second, we use a database of macro-economic climate risk events to formulate an asset-pricing climate "factor", allowing us to estimate climate betas in an empirical asset pricing model for all publicly traded companies. Our inquiry ultimately facilitates an assessment not only of what companies *are* making climate risk disclosures, but also which of them *should be* doing so.