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Abstract:
The United States has many banks that are small relative to large corporations and play a limited role in corporate governance, and a well developed stock market with an associated market for corporate control. In contrast, Japanese and German banks are fewer in number but larger in relative size and are said to play a central governance role. Neither country has an active market for corporate control. We extend the debate on the relative efficiency of bank- and stock market-centered capital markets by developing a further systematic difference between the two systems: the greater vitality of venture capital in stock market-centered systems. Understanding the link between the stock market and the venture capital market requires understanding the contractual arrangements between entrepreneurs and venture capital providers; especially the importance of the opportunity to enter into an implicit contract over control, which gives a successful entrepreneur the option to reacquire control from the venture capitalist by using an initial public offering as the means by which the venture capitalist exits from a portfolio investment. We also extend the literature on venture capital contracting by offering an explanation for two central characteristics of the U.S. venture capital market: relatively rapid exit by venture capital providers from investments in portfolio companies; and the common practice of exit through an initial public offering.

Abstract:
The United States has both an active venture capital industry and well-developed stock markets. Japan and Germany have neither. We argue here that this is no accident -- that venture capital can flourish especially -- and perhaps only -- if the venture capitalist can exit from a successful portfolio company through an initial public offering (IPO), which requires an active stock market. Understanding the link between the stock market and the venture capital market requires understanding the contractual arrangements between entrepreneurs and venture capital providers especially the importance of exit by venture capitalists and the opportunity, present only if IPO exit is possible, for the venture capitalist and the entrepreneur to enter into an implicit contract over control, in which a successful entrepreneur can reacquire control from the venture capitalist by using an IPO as the means of exit.

Note: This article is a shortened version of Black and Gilson, "Venture Capital and the Structure of Capital Markets: Banks versus Stock Markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 47, pp. 243-277, 1998. A nearly final version of the longer article is available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=46909

Abstract:
The focus of comparative corporate governance scholarship is shifting from takeovers to controlling shareholders in recognition of the fact that public corporations everywhere but in the U.S. and U.K. are characterized by a shareholder with effective voting control. Debate is now turning to the merits of controlling shareholder systems, both on their own terms and in comparison to the U.S. and U.K. widely held shareholding pattern. To date, the debate has treated the controlling versus widely held distinction as central, disagreeing over whether a particular country owed its characteristic shareholder distribution to the quality of minority shareholder legal protection or to politics. This simple dichotomy is far too coarse to provide an understanding of the diversity of ownership structures and their policy implications. This article complicates the analysis of controlling shareholders and corporate governance by providing a more nuanced taxonomy of controlling shareholder systems. In particular, it distinguishes between efficient and inefficient controlling shareholders, and between pecuniary and non-pecuniary private benefits of control. The analysis establishes that the appropriate dichotomy is between countries with functionally good law, which support companies with both widely held and controlling shareholder distributions, and countries with functionally bad law, which support only controlling shareholder distributions. In this account, the United States and Sweden are the same side, rather than on opposite sides of the dividing line. The articles examines the different understanding of the role of controlling shareholders in corporate governance and the policy implications that flow from a taxonomy that focuses on support of diverse shareholder distributions.

controlling shareholders, corporate governance, law and finance

Abstract:
This paper examines the interplay between selection-driven functional adaptivity on the one hand, and formal institutional persistence or path dependency on the other, that will determine whether such corporate governance convergence as we observe will be formal or functional. Five combinations of formal and functional covergence are considered: 1) purely functional convergence, as with the displacement of inefficient management; 2) the use of formal tools to catalyze the breakdown of formal barriers to functional convergence as with the elimination of tax on the sale of cross holdings; 3) the need for elements of both formal and functional convergence as with the creation of the institutional infrastructure that supports a venture capital market; 4) convergence by contract as with security design or foreign stock exchange listing; and 5) convergence through regulatory competition -- the hybrid of private and public ordering introduced to the European Community by the European Court of Justice's recent decision in Centros.

Abstract:
The rules governing controlling shareholders sit at the intersection of the two facets of the agency problem at the core of public corporations law. The first is the familiar principal-agency problem that arises from the separation of ownership and control. With only this facet in mind, a large shareholder may better police management than the standard panoply of market-oriented techniques. The second is the agency problem that arises between controlling and non-controlling shareholders, which produces the potential for private benefits of control. There is, however, a point of tangency between these facets. Because there are costs associated with holding a concentrated position and with exercising the monitoring function, some private benefits of control may be necessary to induce a party to play that role. Thus, from the point of view of public shareholders, the two facets of the agency problem present a tradeoff. The presence of a controlling shareholder reduces the managerial agency problem, but at the cost of the private benefits agency problem. Non-controlling shareholders will prefer the presence of a controlling shareholder so long as the benefits from reduction in managerial agency costs are greater than the costs of private benefits of control.

The terms of this tradeoff are determined by the origami of judicial doctrines that describe the fiduciary obligations of a controlling shareholder. In this article, we examine the doctrinal limits on the private benefits of control from a particular orientation. A controlling shareholder may extract private benefits of control in one of three ways: by taking a disproportionate amount of the corporation's ongoing earnings; by freezing out the minority; or by selling control. Our thesis is that the limits on these three methods of extraction must be symmetrical because they are in substantial respects substitutes. We then consider a series of recent Delaware Chancery Court decisions that we argue point in inconsistent directions: on the one hand reducing the extent to which a controlling shareholder can extract private benefits through selling control, and on the other increasing the extent to which private benefits can be extracted through freezing out non-controlling shareholders. While judicial doctrine is too coarse a tool to specify the perfect level of private benefits, we believe these cases get it backwards - the potential for efficiency gains are greater from sale of control than from freeze outs, so that a shift that favors freeze outs as opposed to sales of control is a move in the wrong direction. In particular we argue that the Delaware law of freeze outs can be best reunified by giving "business judgment rule" protection to a transaction that is approved by a genuinely independent special committee that has the power to "say no" to a freeze out merger, while also preserving what amounts to a class-based appraisal remedy for transactions that proceed by freeze out tender offer without a special committee approval.

Controlling and non-controlling shareholder rules, ownership, Delaware law, freeze outs

Abstract:
The capital structures of venture capital-backed U.S. companies share a remarkable commonality: overwhelmingly, venture capitalists make their investments through convertible preferred stock. Not surprisingly, a large part of the academic literature on venture capital has sought to explain this peculiar pattern. Financial economists have developed models showing, for example, that convertible securities allocate control depending on the portfolio company's success, operate as a signal to overcome various kinds of information asymmetry, and align the incentives of entrepreneurs and venture capital investors. In this Article we extend this literature by examining the influence of a more mundane factor, tax law, on venture capital structure. A firm that issues convertible preferred stock to venture capitalists is able to offer more favorable tax treatment for incentive compensation paid to the entrepreneur and other portfolio company employees: Instead of being taxed currently at ordinary income rates, the entrepreneur and employees can defer tax until the incentive compensation is sold (or even longer), at which point a preferential tax rate is available.

No tax rule explicitly connects the employee's tax treatment with the issuance of convertible preferred stock to venture capitalists. Rather, this link is part of tax "practice" - the plumbing of tax law, familiar to practitioners but, predictably, opaque to those, including financial economists, outside the day-to-day tax practice. Despite its obscurity, this tax factor is likely to be of first order importance. Intense incentive compensation for portfolio company founders and employees is a fundamental feature of venture capital contracting. Favorable tax treatment for this compensation is a byproduct and, we believe, a core purpose of the use of convertible preferred stock.

We also highlight an important but low visibility tax subsidy for the venture capital market, and the early stage, usually high technology, firms that are financed there. Although this subsidy arose inadvertently, it has an interesting structure. Funds are not provided directly to companies selected by the government (a familiar technique outside the United States), or to all companies. Instead, venture capital investors are enlisted as the subsidy's gatekeeper. As a practical matter, only companies that can attract venture capital investment receive this subsidy. Our analysis thus adds a different twist on the familiar debate about providing subsidies through the tax system, instead of through direct expenditures or favorable regulatory treatment.

Abstract:
This paper seeks to identify the core of the U.S. venture capital contracting model, and then assess the extent to which the model provides guidance in engineering venture capital markets in other countries and, in particular, in identifying a viable role for government in assisting that project. All financial contracts respond to three central contracting problems: uncertainty, information asymmetry and opportunism in the form of agency costs. The special character of venture capital contracting is shaped by the fact that investing in early stage, high technology companies presents these problems in extreme form. The genius of U.S. venture capital contracting lies in the use of powerful incentives coupled with powerful monitoring for all participants in the process, the braiding of the investor/venture capital fund and venture capital fund/portfolio company contracts, especially with respect to the role of exit and reputation, and the critical role of implicit contracts, especially through the reputation market, to support the dense set of explicit contracts comprising the structure of venture capital contracting. The paper then illustrates the implications of this analysis through consideration of three different government programs - a remarkably unsuccessful early effort in Germany; a more recent, more successful program in Israel; and a newly launched program in Chile.

venture capital, incomplete contracting

Abstract:
Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have increased dramatically in size as a result of increased commodity prices and the increase in the foreign currency reserves of Asian trading countries. SWF assets now roughly equal those in hedge and private equity funds combined. This growth, and the shift of SWF investment strategy toward equities and increasingly high profile investments like capital infusions into U.S. financial institutions following the subprime mortgage problem, have generated calls for domestic and international regulation. The U.S. and other western economies already regulate the foreign acquisition of control of domestic corporations. However, acquisitions of significant but non-controlling positions are not regulated. The danger is that new regulation will compromise the beneficial recycling of trade surpluses accomplished by SWF investments.

In this paper, we situate the controversy over SWF investments in the increasing global trend toward direct governmental involvement in corporate activity, a phenomenon we label the New Merchantilism. We explain why increased transparency of SWF investment portfolios and strategy, the most commonly advanced policy recommendation, does not respond to the chief concern that SWF investments have engendered. We offer a regulatory minimalist response to fears that SWFs will make portfolio investments for strategic rather than economic reasons. Under our proposal, voting rights of SWF equity investments in U.S. corporations would be suspended but reinstated on sale. Thus, SWFs would buy and sell fully voting rights, thereby assuring that the incentives to make non-strategic investments would be unaffected, while the capacity to exercise influence for strategic motives would be constrained. The paper concludes by assessing the extent to which even a regulatory minimalist response remains both over and under inclusive; however, the limited imprecision does not undermine the effectiveness of the response.

Abstract:
Twenty years ago we published a paper, "The Mechanisms of Market Efficiency," that sought to describe the institutional underpinnings of price formation in the securities market. Since that time, financial economics has moved forward on many fronts. The sub-discipline of behavioral finance has struggled to bring yet more descriptive realism to the study of financial markets. Two important questions are (1) how much has this new discipline changed our understanding of the efficiency and nature of the institutional mechanisms that set price in financial markets; and (2) how far does this discipline carry novel implications for the regulation of financial markets or corporate behavior more generally? We argue that, despite its heavy reliance on the psychology of cognitive bias, the principal contribution of behavioral finance is to enrich our understanding of market institutions rather than to present us with a fundamentally new paradigm of market behavior. In particular, the cognitive limitations of individual investors or noise traders are likely to matter to pricing behavior to the extent that they interact with - and are not offset by - the arbitrage mechanism in the market. The most important contribution of behavioral finance lies in sharpening our understanding of the limitations of the arbitrage mechanism. Even when cognitive bias does not have clear implications for securities prices, however, it may have important implications for policy. These implications are unlikely to arise in the area of corporate takeovers, as some have claimed, but they do arise in areas akin to consumer protection, as where cognitive bias might lead unsophisticated investors to construct dangerously undiversified retirement portfolios.

Abstract:
Recent scholarship has argued that the comparative success of the Silicon Valley high technology industrial district and failure of Route 128 outside of Boston, resulted from different patterns of inter-firm employee mobility which, in turn, led to differing patterns of industrial organization: network organization as opposed to traditional vertical integration. The cause of the different patterns of employee mobility is said to be cultural differences between California and Massachusetts. This paper offers a different causal analysis. After reviewing the new economic geography's emphasis on inter-firm knowledge transfers as an agglomeration economy, I focus on the critical role of employee mobility -- the vehicle for inter-firm knowledge transfers -- in facilitating second-stage agglomeration economies: those that allow the district to transcend its original product cycle and reinvent itself. In this account, the legal rules governing employee mobility are a causal antecedent of the construction of each district's culture. In fact, California law prohibits the most effective means of protecting trade secrets embodied in tacit knowledge -- a contractual post-employment covenant not to compete. Massachusetts law, in contrast, allows their enforcement. Consistent with the new economic geography's emphasis on path dependence, the paper shows that California's unusual legal regime dates back to the early 1870's, a serendipitous result of the historical coincidence between the codification movement in the United States and the problems confronting a new state in developing a coherent legal system. The paper concludes with a cautionary note concerning the implications of the analysis for three related subjects: the standard law and economic prescription to fully protect property rights in intellectual property; a disturbing recent line of cases concerning claims of "inevitable disclosure" that threatens to turn trade secret law into the judicial equivalent of a covenant not to compete; and the right strategy for policy analysts assessing reform of a region's legal system to encourage high technology industrial districts.

Abstract:
The fact of a small number of hostile takeover bids in Japan the recent past, together with technical amendments of the Civil Code that would allow a poison pill-like security, raises the question of how a poison pill would operate in Japan should it be widely deployed. This paper reviews the U.S. experience with the pill to the end of identifying what institutions operated to prevent the poison pill from fully enabling the target board to block a hostile takeover. It then considers whether similar ameliorating institutions are available in Japan, and concludes that with the exception of the court system, Japan lacks the range institutions that proved to be effective in the United States. As a result, the Japanese courts will have a heavy responsibility in framing limits on the use of poison pills.

Abstract:
The fact of a small number of hostile takeover bids in Japan the recent past, together with technical amendments of the Civil Code that would allow a poison pill-like security, raises the question of how a poison pill would operate in Japan should it be widely deployed. This paper reviews the U.S. experience with the pill to the end of identifying what institutions operated to prevent the poison pill from fully enabling the target board to block a hostile takeover. It then considers whether similar ameliorating institutions are available in Japan, and concludes that with the exception of the court system, Japan lacks the range institutions that proved to be effective in the United States. As a result, the Japanese courts will have a heavy responsibility in framing limits on the use of poison pills.

Abstract:
The traditional law and finance focus on agency costs presumes, without acknowledgement, that the premise that diversified public shareholders are the cheapest risk-bearers is immutable. In this Essay, we raise the possibility that changes in the capital markets have called this premise into question, drawn into sharp relief by the recent private equity buying wave in which the size and range of public companies being taken private expanded significantly. In brief, we argue that private owners, in increasingly complete markets, can transfer risk in discrete slices to counterparties who, in turn, can manage or otherwise diversify away those risks they choose to forego, arguably becoming a lower cost substitute for traditional risk capital.

If diversified shareholders are no longer the cheapest risk-bearers, then the associated agency costs may now be voluntary; and, if risk management can substitute for risk capital, without requiring a transfer of ownership, then why go public at all? Do more complete capital markets herald (once again) the eclipse of the public corporation? We offer some preliminary responses, suggesting that the line between public and private firms may begin to blur as the traditional balance between agency costs and the benefits of public ownership shifts towards a new equilibrium. For some, the benefits of public ownership may continue to outweigh the associated agency costs. For others, changes in risk transfer may implicate how a firm is (or should be) governed. The Essay then ends with a final question: If the opportunity to invest in common stock recedes, by what means will former investors in public equity be able to invest capital?

agency costs, capital markets, corporate governance, derivatives, LBO, private equity, risk, risk management

Abstract:
This article is part of a symposium in honor of William Klein on the subject of a functional typology of corporation law. Any typology must be animated by an underlying theory whose terms dictate the lines the typology draws. Here the focus is on the level of the theory that might animate the architecture of the grid. In particular, the article addresses the separation theorem, which states the implications of complete capital markets on shareholder preferences concerning corporate investment policy. The proposition is that the presence of markets in the characteristics that determine equity value makes a radical difference in the function played by corporate law, in these circumstances essentially limiting the criteria for good corporate law to a single overriding goal: facilitating the maximization of shareholder wealth. I will illustrate the usefulness of a uni-criterion view of corporate law by briefly taking up two familiar issues that span the corporate law domain: the idea of a stakeholder-oriented board of directors in public corporations and the role of the courts in enforcing the reasonable expectations of private corporation shareholders.

Shareholders vs. stakeholders, close corporations

Abstract:
The standard contract that governs friendly mergers contains a material adverse change clause (a MAC) and a material adverse effect clause (a MAE); these clauses permit a buyer costlessly to cancel the deal if such a change or effect occurs. In recent years, the application of the traditional standard-like MAC and MAE term has been restricted by a detailed set of exceptions that curtails the buyer's ability to exit. The term today engenders substantial litigation and occupies center stage in the negotiation of merger agreements. This paper asks what functions the MAC and MAE term serve, what function the exceptions serve and why the exceptions have arisen only recently. It answers that the term encourages the target to make otherwise noncontractable synergy investments that would reduce the likelihood of low value realizations, because the term permits the buyer to exit in the event the proposed corporate combination comes to have a low value. The exceptions to the MAC and MAE term impose exogenous risk on the buyer; the parties cannot affect this risk and the buyer is a relatively superior risk bearer. The exceptions have arisen recently because the changing nature of modern deals make the materialization of exogenous risk a more serious danger than it had been. The modern MAC and MAE term thus responds to the threat of moral hazard by both parties in the sometimes lengthy interim between executing a merger agreement and closing it. The paper's empirical part examines actual merger contracts and reports results that are consistent with the analysis.

Abstract:
The standard contract that governs friendly mergers contains a material adverse change clause (a "MAC") and a material adverse effect clause (a "MAE"); these clauses permit a buyer costlessly to cancel the deal if such a change or effect occurs. In recent years, the application of the traditional standard-like MAC and MAE term has been restricted by a detailed set of exceptions that curtails the buyer's ability to exit. The term today engenders substantial litigation and occupies center stage in the negotiation of merger agreements. This paper asks what functions the MAC and MAE term serve, what function the exceptions serve and why the exceptions have arisen only recently. It answers that the term encourages the target to make otherwise noncontractable synergy investments that would reduce the likelihood of low value realizations, because the term permits the buyer to exit in the event the proposed corporate combination comes to have a low value. The exceptions to the MAC and MAE term impose exogenous risk on the buyer; the parties cannot affect this risk and the buyer is a relatively superior risk bearer. The exceptions have arisen recently because the changing nature of modern deals make the materialization of exogenous risk a more serious danger than it had been. The modern MAC and MAE term thus responds to the threat of moral hazard by both parties in the sometimes lengthy interim between executing a merger agreement and closing it. The paper's empirical part examines actual merger contracts and reports preliminary results that are consistent with the analysis.

Abstract:
The Law and Finance account of the ubiquity of controlling shareholders in developing markets is based on conditions in the capital market: poor shareholder protection law prevents controlling shareholders from parting with control out of fear of exploitation by a new controlling shareholder who acquires a controlling position in the market. This explanation, however, does not address why we observe any minority shareholders in such markets, or why controlling shareholders in developing markets are most often family-based. This paper looks at the impact of bad law on shareholder distribution in a very different way. Developing countries typically provide not only poor minority protection, but poor commercial law generally. Specifically, the paper considers the impact on the distribution of shareholders of conditions in the product market, where the driving legal influence is the quality of commercial law that supports the corporation's actual business activities, and where the presence of a controlling family shareholder may help support reputation-based trading in a bad commercial law environment.

controlling shareholders, family ownership, developing countries

Abstract:
Under standard accounts of corporate governance, capital markets play a significant role in monitoring management performance and, where appropriate, replacing management whose performance does not measure up. Recent case law in Delaware, however, appears to have altered dramatically the mechanisms through which the market for corporate control must operate. In particular, the interaction of the poison pill and the Delaware Supreme Court's development of the legal standard governing defensive tactics in response to tender offers have resulted in a decided, but as yet unexplained, preference for control changes mediated by means of an election rather than by a market. In this paper, we begin the evaluation of the preference for elections over markets that the Delaware Supreme Court has not yet attempted. We apply to this effort both doctrinal logic and insights derived from an interesting but complex formal literature that has developed to understand how voting structures work in political contests and jury deliberations. Since these contexts differ substantially from transfers of corporate control, our analysis raises a question of fit: are voting models suitable for analyzing the question asked here? In our view, the models do shed some light on the takeover institution, but if this view is ultimately rejected, then we will have eliminated what at least superficially appears to be a useful set of tools.

Abstract:
The coincidence of the new millennium and the fifteenth anniversary of the Delaware Supreme Court's announcement of a new approach to takeover law provides an appropriate occasion to step back and evaluate a remarkable experiment in corporate law - the Delaware Supreme Court's development of an intermediate standard for evaluating defensive tactics. I will argue that Unocal has developed into an unexplained and, I think, inexplicable preference that control contests be resolved through elections rather than market transactions. In doing so, I will highlight the remarkable struggle between the Chancery Court and the Supreme Court for Unocal's soul, a contest I will suggest the Supreme Court won only by fiat. I will also maintain that the current debate over shareholder-adopted bylaws that repeal or amend director-adopted poison pills provides a vehicle to reposition Delaware takeover law. Finally, I will end my retrospective on a note of praise. Intertwined with the development of Delaware takeover law is a reassessment and important expansion of the role of independent directors in corporate governance. There is no reason why this important development cannot be preserved if the Delaware Supreme Court chooses otherwise to restore balance to the law of takeovers.

Abstract:
This article was written for a symposium on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Martin Lipton's 1979 article, Takeover Bids in the Target's Boardroom. In our view, Takeover Bids is a Burkean take on a messy Schumpeterian world that, during 1980s, reached its apex in Drexel Burnham's democratization of finance through the junk bond market. But the irony is that today, long after the Delaware Supreme Court has adopted many of Lipton's views, there is a new market for corporate control that no longer poses the threats - or supports the opportunities - that the market of the 1980s created. Today's strategic bidders and their targets share the same boardroom views. And for precisely this reason, "just say no" is no longer the battle cry that it once was. It stirred the crowds in the past precisely because hostile takeovers could be credibly depicted as a sweeping threat to the status quo - a claim that no one would make about today's strategic bidders. The market for corporate control now is a process of peer review, rather than an instrument of systemic change. What is lost as a result is just what, in the conservative view, has been gained: the capacity of the market for corporate control to ignite the dynamism that in our view has served the U.S. economy so well. Although Lipton may still lose today's battle to allow targets to just say no to intra-establishment takeovers, he will still have won the larger war. For now, at least, boardrooms are insulated from much of the force of a truly Schumpeterian market in corporate control of the sort we briefly glimpsed during the 1980s.

Takeovers, defensive tactics

Abstract:
Three themes animate Martin Lipton and Paul Rowe's thoughtful response to my critical evaluation of Unocal's fifteen-year history. First, they maintain that affording shareholders a primary role in the governance of takeovers depends on a commitment to the stock market's informational efficiency. Second, they claim that allowing shareholders to amend or repeal a poison pill ignores empirical evidence that the existence of a poison pill is associated with higher takeover premiums. Third, they assert that the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL) reflects an implicit mega-principle that assigns control over takeovers to managers. This short reply corrects Lipton and Rowe's misunderstanding of the importance of market efficiency in assessing the efficiency of a primary role for shareholders in takeover decision making; suggests that the impact of a poison pill on takeover premiums depends entirely on what a court will allow a target company to do with its pill; and, finally, complicates Lipton and Rowe's argument that the structure of the DGCL implies a primary takeover role for the board.

Abstract:
In Unocal Fifteen Years Later I offered a respectful but negative assessment of the Delaware Supreme Court's post-Unocal efforts to walk a line between managerialists who believe directors should be able to block a hostile takeover, and those who believe the ultimate decision whether to accept a takeover bid belongs to the shareholders. I suggested that Delaware law could be repositioned without requiring the Delaware Supreme Court to confess error by allowing shareholder adopted bylaws that repeal or amend poison pills. Martin Lipton and Paul Rowe responded to my essay by arguing that recent economic challenges to efficient market theory, together with studies showing that the poison pill leads to increased takeover premia, undermines the premise on which a shareholder choice regime is based. In this reply, I correct Lipton and Rowe's misunderstanding of the role of market efficiency (and recent critical studies) in assessing shareholders' role in the governance of takeovers, as well as their assessment of why a poison pill may increase takeover premia.

Abstract:
Rapidly innovating industries are just not behaving the way theory expected. Conventional industrial organization theory predicts that when parties in the supply chain have to make transaction-specific investments, the risk of opportunism will drive them away from contracts and toward vertical integration. Despite the conventional theory, contemporary practice is moving in the other direction. Instead of vertical integration, we observe vertical disintegration in a significant number of industries, as producers recognize that they cannot themselves maintain cutting-edge technology in every field required for the success of their product. In doing this, the parties are developing forms of contracting beyond the reach of contract theory models. In this Article, we connect the emerging contract practice to theory, learning from what has happened in the real world to frame a theoretical explanation of this cross-organizational innovation and to reconceptualize the boundaries of the firm accordingly. We argue that the vertical disintegration of the supply chain in many industries is mediated neither by fully specified technical interfaces that allow suppliers to produce a modular piece of the ultimate product, nor by entirely implicit relational contracts supported only by norms of reciprocity and the expectation of future dealings. Rather, we suggest that the change in the boundary of the firm has given rise to a new form of contracting between firms - what we call contracting for innovation. This pattern braids explicit and implicit contracting to support iterative collaborative innovation by raising switching costs. These costs, represented by the parties' parallel investment in transaction specific investment in knowledge about their collaborators' capacities, deter opportunism under circumstances when explicit contracting, renegotiation and the anticipation of future dealings cannot.

vertical integration, contracting, switching costs, innovation

Abstract:
The coincidence of the new millennium and the fifteenth anniversary of the Delaware Supreme Court's announcement of a new approach to takeover law provides an occasion to evaluate a remarkable experiment in corporate law; the Delaware Supreme Court's development of an intermediate standard of review for appraising defensive tactics. This assessment reveals that Unocal has developed into an unexplained and likely inexplicable preference that control contests be resolved through elections rather than through market transactions. In doing so, the
remarkable struggle between the chancery court and the supreme court for Unocal's soul is canvassed. The author also maintains that the current debate over shareholder-adopted bylaws that repeal or amend director- adopted poison pills provides a vehicle to reposition Delaware takeover law. Finally, the retrospective ends on a note of praise. Intertwined with the development of Delaware takeover law is a reassessment and important expansion of the role of independent directors in corporate governance. There is no reason why this important improvement cannot be preserved if the Delaware Supreme Court chooses otherwise to restore balance to the law of takeovers.

Abstract:
Rapidly innovating industries are just not behaving the way theory expected. Conventional industrial organization theory predicts that when parties in the supply chain have to make transaction-specific investments, the risk of opportunism will drive them away from contracts and toward vertical integration. Despite the conventional theory, contemporary practice is moving in the other direction. Instead of vertical integration, we observe vertical disintegration in a significant number of industries, as producers recognize that they cannot themselves maintain cutting-edge technology in every field required for the success of their product. In doing this, the parties are developing forms of contracting beyond the reach of contract theory models. In this Article, we connect the emerging contract practice to theory, learning from what has happened in the real world to frame a theoretical explanation of this cross-organizational innovation and to reconceptualize the boundaries of the firm accordingly. We argue that the vertical disintegration of the supply chain in many industries is mediated neither by fully specified technical interfaces that allow suppliers to produce a modular piece of the ultimate product, nor by entirely implicit relational contracts supported only by norms of reciprocity and the expectation of future dealings. Rather, we suggest that the change in the boundary of the firm has given rise to a new form of contracting between firms - what we call contracting for innovation. This pattern braids explicit and implicit contracting to support iterative collaborative innovation by raising switching costs. These costs, represented by the parties' parallel investment in transaction specific investment in knowledge about their collaborators' capacities, deter opportunism under circumstances when explicit contracting, renegotiation and the anticipation of future dealings cannot.

Abstract:
Two decades ago, the Virginia Law Review published our article "The Mechanisms of Market Efficiency" (MOME), in which we tried to discern the institutional underpinnings of financial market efficiency. We concluded that the level of market efficiency with respect to a particular fact depends on which of several market mechanisms - universally informed trading, professionally informed trading, derivatively informed trading, and uninformed trading operates to reflect that fact in market price. Revisiting our article is particularly appropriate today. A new framework for evaluating the efficiency of the stock market, called "behavioral finance," and a growing number of empirical studies pose a serious challenge to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. Twenty years have made us appropriately more skeptical of the efficiency of those institutions.

Market efficiency, financial market efficiency, universally informed trading, professionally informed trading, derivatievly informed trading, uninformed trading, behavioral finance, efficients markets hypothesis, securities and exchange, capital asset prices, capital markets, valuation

Abstract:
In Japan, large firms' relationships with their employees differ from those prevailing in large American firms. Large Japanese firms guarantee many employees lifetime employment, and the firms' boards consist of insider employees. Neither relationship is common in the United States. Japanese lifetime employment is said to encourage firms and employees to invest in human capital. We examine the reported benefits of the firm's promise of lifetime employment, but conclude that it is no more than peripheral to human capital investments. Rather, the 'dark' side of Japanese labor practice--constricting the external labor market--likely yielded the human capital benefits, not the 'bright' side of secure employment. What then explains the firm's promises of lifetime employment in Japan, a practice that developed following World War II, when labor was in surplus, and hence economically weak? We hypothesize two political explanations, one 'macro' and one 'micro.' The 'macro' hypothesis is that a coalition of conservative and managerial interests sought lifetime employment to reduce the chances of socialist electoral victories. The 'micro' hypothesis is that managers tried to defeat hostile unions and win back factories from worker occupation, firm-by-firm, by offering lifetime employment to a core of workers. Neither the 'macro' nor the 'micro' goals were intended to improve human capital training, but rather to reduce worker influence, either in elections or in the factory. We assess the evidence for these hypotheses. We look at Japanese labor practices and related corporate governance institutions as 'path dependent': A political decision 'fixes' one institution and then the system evolves in light of that fixed institution by developing efficient complementary institutions.

Abstract:
There is much we do not understand about the “location” of innovation: the confluence, for a particular innovation, of the technology associated with the innovation, the innovating firm’s size and organizational structure, and the financial contracting that supports the innovation. This Essay suggests that these three indicia are simultaneously determined and discusses the interaction among them through four examples of innovative activity whose location is characterized by tradeoffs between pursuing the activity in an established company; in a smaller, earlier stage company; or some combination of the two. It first considers the dilemma faced by an established company in deciding whether to keep an employee’s innovation or allow the employee to pursue the innovation through a startup. It next takes up a very different relationship between an established company and an earlier stage company: the development by the smaller company of a “disruptive” innovation that displaces the industry’s dominant companies. The Essay then considers an established company’s instrumental use of the startup market to outsource development of a particular innovation to a technology race. Finally, the Essay examines a form of innovation located between an established and earlier stage company: the pattern of joint ventures between large pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotechnology companies.

venture capital, innovation, organization design, corporations

Abstract:
Explores the strong link between the venture capital (VC) market and the stock market-centered capital market. Contrasts this with the bank centered capital markets of such countries as Germany and Japan, which allot more firm control to banks. The United States has a strong venture capital industry focused on early-stage financing of high-technology companies while in Germany, e.g., the venture capital industry is almost nonexistent, and exit strategies for venture capitalists differ in that country, with its lesser emphasis on the stock market. In the United States, VC fund managers have developed strategies in which they efficiently exit their investments, and the analysis herein considers the initial public offering (IPO) to be the point at which venture capitalists will exit. It is assumed that the entrepreneur places strong importance on control of his or her company. Often though, this control cannot be retained at the time of financing by an inexperienced entrepreneur. These entrepreneurs can regain control if the company is successful through an IPO exit of the venture capitalists. Regaining control is usually through an implicit contract over control between the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist that results from the entrepreneur's success. The implication of this framework is that the success of early stage venture capital financing is linked to the availability of VC exit and return of control to the entrepreneur. The venture capital market will be impaired in countries where the only option for exit is by acquisition, thus leaving the entrepreneur without the preferred control. Analyses of the VC markets in Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel are also presented, with explanations for venture capital market variations by country. (SRD)

Banks, Stock markets, Firm governance, Initial public offerings (IPO), Firm control, Early stage financing, Exit strategies, Early stage capital, Venture capital, Financial markets

Abstract:
This paper is an interview in which I am given the privilege of talking about the future of corporate governance without the burden of either documenting the basis for my views or, frankly, fully working out their internal logic. Nonetheless, the interview does express some thoughts about the endogenity of governance structures,and especially about the role of governance in high technology companies.

Abstract:
The prototypical start up involves an employee leaving her job with an idea, and selling a portion of that idea to a venture capitalist. Yet the idea should be worth more to the former employer. In this setting, the former employer can be expected to have better information concerning the employee-entrepreneur and the technology, have opportunities to capture economies of scale and scope not available to a venture capital-backed start-up, and will receive more favorable tax treatment than the start-up should the innovation fail. In connection with an auction of the idea, the former employer should have both a more accurate estimate of its value and receive an element of private value not available to the venture capitalist. In turn, this should give rise to a powerful winner's curse: each time a venture capitalist wins the auction, it will have paid more than a party that has better information and receives an element of private value, in contrast to the venture capitalist's receipt of only common value. The puzzle, then is why we ever observe start-ups? Our analysis of the former-employer's bidding strategy stresses the impact on the employer's ongoing research effort of purchasing a share in the employee's idea for a price comparable to what a venture capitalist would pay. Where research is a team effort, an employer's bidding creates an incentive for employees to establish internal property rights to their research efforts.

Such influence activities reduce the future output of the employer's R&D efforts. Thus, in setting the internal incentives of its research employees -- in effect, the employer's internal bid for the discovery -- an employer must trade off the between the strength of the incentives and the impact on the overall research effort of high individual payoffs to innovation. The employer sets the internal payoff to discovery to equalize the marginal benefit of an additional unit of incentive (a higher bid) and the marginal cost of the resulting decrease in the effectiveness of its research effort. Some employees are therefore allowed to leave, and start-ups are observed.

Abstract:
Corporate governance attracted attention beyond the realm of lawyers and quite specific legal rules because of the growing perception that a link existed between corporate governance and corporate performance: better governance, the hypothesis goes, yields more efficient production. The potential link between governance and institutions was given saliency by the large institutional differences between the corporate governance systems of the three most successful industrial economies: Germany's universal bank centered system; Japan's main bank/cross holdings centered system; and the United State's stock market centered system. This paper examines the hypothesized link between corporate governance and economic efficiency through two lenses that highlight the role of national institutions: path dependency and industrial organization. The goal is a clearer understanding of the role of corporate governance institutions as vehicles of adaptive efficiency.

Abstract:
Recognition that organizational and transactional structure can be understood as mechanisms that economize on information, bargaining, and agency costs has given rise to a large and important literature that explains the existence and efficiency of particular institutional arrangements by reference to the transaction cost properties of the activity involved. The question, then, is what mechanisms drive the transaction cost economizing process itself. One might simply rely on the assumption of competition. But it would be strange if an economic orientation that focused on market imperfections to explain observed patterns of organizing economic activity fell back on the invisible hand (and the institutionless features) of market driven selection to explain the mechanisms of transaction cost economizing. This paper examines the role of business lawyers as transaction cost engineers whose function is to act as organizational intermediaries, designing transaction cost efficient structures through which to carry out productive activities.

Abstract:
For the last ten years, Japanese corporate governance has served as a distant mirror in whose reflection American academics could better see the attributes of their own system. As scholars came to recognize that the institutional characteristics of the American and Japanese systems were politically and historically contingent, other countries' approaches became serious objects of studies, rather than just way stations on the road to convergence. In this paper, I try to return the favor by holding up the Japanese system to an American mirror. In recent years, exogenous changes have shocked each component of the Japanese corporate governance: for example, weakened banks and corporate access to the global capital market have weakened main bank relations and the banks' ability to monitor corporate performance; a decrease in the number of positions to which lifetime employment attaches due to increased global competition threatens to change the incentives of the next generation of employees. When reflected in an American mirror, this wave of economic change highlights a critical uncertainty concerning the Japanese corporate governance system: what are the instruments of adaptive efficiency in a system structured to support commitment and stability?