IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/8703.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal Defaults for Corporate Law Evolution

Author

Listed:
  • Lucian Arye Bebchuk
  • Assaf Hamdani

Abstract

Public corporations live in a dynamic and ever-changing business environment. This paper examines how courts and legislators should choose default arrangements in the corporate area to address new circumstances. We show that the interests of the shareholders of existing companies would not be served by adopting those defaults arrangements that public officials view as most likely to be value-enhancing. Because any charter amendment requires the board's initiative, opting out of an inefficient default arrangement is much more likely to occur when management disfavors the arrangement than management supports it. We develop a 'reversible defaults' approach that takes into account this asymmetry. When public officials must choose between two or more default arrangements and face significant uncertainty as to which one would best serve shareholders, they should err in favor of the arrangement that is less favorable to managers. Such an approach, we show, would make it most likely that companies would be ultimately governed by the arrangement that would maximize shareholder value. Evaluating some of the main choices that state corporate law has made in the past two decades in light of our proposed approach, we endorse some but question others. The arrangements we examine include those developed with respect to director liability, state antitakeover statutes, and the range of permitted defensive tactics.

Suggested Citation

  • Lucian Arye Bebchuk & Assaf Hamdani, 2002. "Optimal Defaults for Corporate Law Evolution," NBER Working Papers 8703, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8703
    Note: LE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w8703.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yair Listokin, 2010. "If you Give Shareholders Power, do they Use it? An Empirical Analysis," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 166(1), pages 38-53, March.
    2. Sokolyk, Tatyana, 2011. "The effects of antitakeover provisions on acquisition targets," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 612-627, June.
    3. Anne Anderson & Jill Brown & Parveen P. Gupta, 2017. "Jurisdictional competition for corporate charters and firm value: a reexamination of the Delaware effect," International Journal of Disclosure and Governance, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 14(4), pages 341-356, November.
    4. Karpoff, Jonathan M. & Schonlau, Robert & Wehrly, Eric, 2022. "Which antitakeover provisions deter takeovers?," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    5. Hanna Almlöf & Per-Olof Bjuggren, 2019. "A regulation and transaction cost perspective on the design of corporate law," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 47(3), pages 407-433, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8703. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.