Spring & Summer 2020
Blue Sky Meetings
Sponsored By
April 08, 2020 (Wed) at 12:10 PM
Katharina Pistor
-
Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law,
Columbia Law School -
Director, Center on Global Legal Transformation,
Columbia Law School
Medium
Zoom teleconference
Email [email protected] for more information.
Topic
Governing the New Socialist Firm
No paper will be distributed.
April 15, 2020 (Wed) at 12:10 PM
Kathryn Judge
-
Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law
Medium
Zoom teleconference
Email [email protected] for more information.
Topic
The Role of the Federal Reserve in Containing the Economic Fallout from COVID-19
Materials provided with Zoom invitation.
April 22, 2020 (Wed) at 12:10 PM
Henry Hansmann
- Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School
-
Senior Fellow, Center for Contract and Economic Organization, Columbia Law School
Medium
Zoom teleconference.
For more information, please email [email protected].
Topic
Exit, Voice, Liability, and Scope: Tradeoffs in Limiting Agency Costs (Introduction)
Co-author: Reinier Kraakman (Harvard Law School)
Abstract
The contemporary literature on organizational law and economics focuses with singular intensity on managerial agency costs. We analyze the four principal mechanisms employed to limit those costs, in both commercial and non-commercial organizations, since the Renaissance, with a particular focus on relationships among the mechanisms.
Two of the four mechanisms -- the right to withdraw from the firm, and the right to participate in its management – are, respectively, analogous to the late Albert Hirschman’s famous concepts of “exit” and “voice.” In contrast to conventional interpretations of Hirschman, however, we find that these two mechanisms are typically complements rather than substitutes: strong exit rights generally accompany strong voice. The same is true, moreover, of our third mechanism, “liability,” which is the right of the organization’s owners (or principal beneficiaries) to bring suit against the organization’s managers for breach of fiduciary duty. That is, managers constrained by strict fiduciary duties are also typically constrained by stronger owner rights of exit and voice. It is only in our fourth constraining mechanism –limiting the “scope” of the authority delegated to managers – that we find much substitutability with the other three mechanisms -- and even limited scope is, in important cases, employed where managers are also constrained by strong owner rights of exit, voice, and liability.
This strong complementarity among devices for constraining the actions of managers, we suggest, is primarily a response to another fundamental agency problem in organizational design: the exploitation of non controlling owners (or beneficiaries) by controlling owners. Although strong owner rights of exit, voice, and liability can help assure that an organization’s managers serve its owners well as a class, these mechanisms can also be used to redistribute value among the class of owners itself. Apparently these conflicts of interest among owners commonly overshadow managerial agency costs, which appear to be, in general, only a second-order problem in organizational design.
May 6, 2020 (Wed) at 12:10 PM
Merritt Fox
-
Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law,
Columbia Law School -
Co-Director, Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets,
Columbia Law School -
Co-Director, Center for Law and Economic Studies,
Columbia Law School
Lawrence Glosten
- S. Sloan Colt Professor of Banking and International Finance,
Columbia Business School
- Co-Director, Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets,
Columbia Law School
Sue Guan
- Research Scholar, Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets,
Columbia Law School
Medium
Zoom teleconference.
For more information, please email [email protected].
Topic
Description
Merritt Fox, Larry Glosten, and Sue Guan are working on a project concerning securities law manipulation through making bids and offers in the market ("quote manipulation"), as opposed to manipulation by engaging in actual transactions, which is at least what a literal reading of the existing statutes appears to require for the manipulation to be illegal.
"Spoofing" and "layering" are terms that have been used for particular types of quote manipulation. After Dodd-Frank, "spoofing" is illegal in the markets related by the Commodities Act but the term is not defined. There is no parallel change under the securities laws, though the SEC is pursuing headline cases as though quote manipulation was clearly illegal.
August 3, 2020 (Mon) at 12:10 PM
Jens Frankenreiter
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Empirical Law and Economics,
Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, Columbia Law School
Medium
Zoom teleconference.
Link will be distributed a few days before the event.
For more information, please email [email protected].
Topic
The Missing "California Effect" in Data Privacy Law
Paper provided with Zoom invitation.
Abstract
The “California Effect” is a recurring trope in discussions about regulatory interdependence. This effect predicts that businesses active in multiple jurisdictions will sometimes adopt the strictest standards that they face in any jurisdiction even if global compliance is not mandated by the law. When California Effects occur, they increase the interdependence between jurisdictions and give rise to a number of normative concerns and potential policy implications. However, there is little empirical evidence to support the widespread existence of such effects.
This paper contributes to the literature on regulatory interdependence by investigating the existence of California Effects in data privacy law, a field in which these effects have been predicted to be particularly influential. Its main goal is to understand the extent to which transactions between U.S. online services and consumers in the U.S. are influenced by EU data privacy law. Making use of a range of computational and traditional quantitative techniques, the paper analyzes a large corpus of privacy policies spanning a two-year period between 2017 and 2019. The results from this analysis suggest, first, that California Effects might be less important than is commonly assumed, at least in the area of data privacy law. Second, the results also document that the impact of EU data privacy law on the operations of U.S. online services is limited. Both findings have important implications for researchers and policy makers alike.