Federal Corporate Law: Lessons from History
48 Pages Posted: 29 Aug 2006 Last revised: 15 Apr 2015
Abstract
This paper analyzes the history of federal intervention in corporate law and draws from it lessons for the future. We show that federal intervention has generally not alternated between tightening state law restrictions on corporate insiders and relaxing them. Rather, federal law has systematically replaced state law arrangements with ones imposing tighter constraints on insiders. Without federal intervention, state law would have produced a corporate system that provides substantially weaker investor protection than the United States enjoys today. We also show that federal interventions have systematically taken advantage of additional tools (including public enforcement, criminal sanctions, gatekeeper liability, and agency-based regulations) beyond those that state law has chosen or been able to use. Overall, unless one views existing levels of investor protection as substantially excessive, past patterns suggest that state competition on its own is unlikely to produce an adequate level of investor protection. Furthermore, the recurring need for federal officials to rectify state law failures in order to provide investors with adequate protection indicates that federal lawmaking should be proactive rather than reactive. We thus recommend that, going forward, federal policymakers examine in a systematic and comprehensive fashion which corporate law areas should be federalized either because tighter restrictions on insiders are needed or because the additional tools available to federal law would be useful.
Keywords: State competition, regulatory competition, Delaware regulations, incorporations, Corporate Charters, corporate law, corporate governance, securities regulations, SEC
JEL Classification: G30, G38, H70, K22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
The Modern Industrial Revolution, Exit, and the Failure of Internal Control Systems
-
Boards of Directors as an Endogenously Determined Institution: A Survey of the Economic Literature
-
Boards of Directors as an Endogenously Determined Institution: A Survey of the Economic Literature
-
Boards of Directors as an Endogenously Determined Institution: A Survey of the Economic Literature
-
CEO Involvement in the Selection of New Board Members: An Empirical Analysis
By David Yermack and Anil Shivdasani
-
The Uncertain Relationship between Board Composition and Firm Performance
By Sanjai Bhagat and Bernard S. Black
-
The Non-Correlation between Board Independence and Long-Term Firm Performance
By Sanjai Bhagat and Bernard S. Black
-
The Non-Correlation between Board Independence And Long-Term Firm Performance
By Sanjai Bhagat and Bernard S. Black