Business Scholarship Podcast

Christina Skinner, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Central Bank Activism. In this article, Skinner critically analyzes demands that central banks like the Federal Reserve step beyond their traditional monetary mandates to tackle other fiscal and social challenges, such as climate change, income and racial inequality, or foreign and small-business aid.

Emmanuel Yimfor, assistant professor of finance at the University of Michigan, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his paper Misconduct Synergies, which was co-authored with Heather Tookes of Yale University. In this paper, Yimfor and Tookes conduct a study of M&A in the investment-advisory industry and find that following mergers, a large share employees of the acquired firm who have prior misconduct leave the combined firm. Contrary to some expectations in the literature, the authors find that firms with high or low misconduct tend to acquire firms with similar misconduct histories.

Angela Aneiros, lecturer at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article The Unlikely Pressure for Accountability: The Insurance Industry’s Role in Social Change. In this article Aneiros examines the role of D&O insurance in shaping corporate directors’ decisions around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Paolo Saguato, assistant professor of law at George Mason University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his articles Financial Regulation, Corporate Governance, and the Hidden Costs of Clearinghouses and article The Ownership of Clearinghouses: When ‘Skin in the Game’ Is Not Enough, the Remutualization of Clearinghouses. In these articles, Saguato conducts political-economy analyses of securities clearinghouses and their systemic risks.

Benjamin Ho, associate professor of economics at Vassar College, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his paper Do Investors Care about Corporate Apologies? Evidence from Chemical Disasters, which he co-authored with Sijia Fan, Qi Ge, and Lirong Ma. In this paper, Ho and his co-authors study impacts on stock prices when companies apologize after chemical disasters. They find that although admissions of error might help restore trust with the public and regulators, those apologies can also reduce investors’ perceptions of firm competence, leading to drops in stock price.

Melissa Jacoby, professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her essay Shocking Business Bankruptcy Law. In this essay Jacoby examines what she dubs “ad hoc” and “off-label” business bankruptcies as opportunistic uses of Chapter 11 for purposes other than managing overindebtedness.

David Kershaw, dean and professor at the London School of Economics Law School, and Edmund Schuster, associate professor at the London School of Economics Law School, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their article The Purposive Transformation of Corporate Law. In this article Kershaw and Schuster frame the long-standing question of what is a corporation’s purpose in terms of aspirational mission-purpose. This frame, the authors argue, in turn requires either that shareholders be purposeful themselves or that corporate law insulate purpose from shareholders.

Four scholars join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their recent work on unicorn startups. Abraham Cable, professor of law at the University of California Hastings, is the author of Time Enough for Counting: A Unicorn Retrospective; Alexander Platt, associate professor of law at the University of Kansas, is the author of Unicorniphobia; Matthew Wansley, assistant professor of law at Yeshiva University, is the author of Taming Unicorns; and Amy Deen Westbrook, professor of law at Washburn University, is the author of We(‘re) Working on Corporate Governance: Stakeholder Vulnerability in Unicorn Companies.

Tom Gosling, executive fellow of finance at the London Business School, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article CEO Compensation: Evidence From the Field, which he co-authored with Alex Edmans of the London Business School and Dirk Jenter of the London School of Economics. In their article, Gosling and his co-authors conduct an interview-based field study of public-company directors and investors on how boards set CEO compensation and under what constraints they make those decisions.

Harwell Wells, professor of law at Temple University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article Shareholder Meetings and Freedom Rides: The Story of Peck v Greyhound. In this article, Wells recounts the efforts of Bayard Rustin and James Peck to use the proxy rules and their purchase of Greyhound shares to protest the bus company’s segregationist policies. These efforts were ultimately thwarted, Wells explains, by the SEC’s re-writing of the proxy rules to undermine civil-rights shareholder activism.

Afra Afsharipour, professor of law at the University of California, Davis, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Women and M&A. In this empirical study Afsharipour highlights the dearth of women among lead lawyers in the largest public-company M&A deals. She relates this gap to prior literatures on board and executive gender diversity and proposes steps to help close it.

Jeremy Kress, assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article Who’s Looking Out For The Banks?. Kress examines the risk of exploitation that national banks face when they are part of financial conglomerates whose nonbank affiliates might seek to benefit from banking subsidies. He locates this risk in director overlap between the boards of banks and their parent companies and proposes reforms to bolster the independence of bank subsidiaries’ boards.

Colleen Honigsberg, associate professor of law at Stanford University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Deleting Misconduct: The Expungement of BrokerCheck Records, which she co-authored with Matthew Jacob. In the article Honigsberg examines 6,660 requests for expungement of alleged misconduct by securities brokers, including what those requests and their outcomes mean for brokers’ subsequent careers and recidivism risk.

Steven Boivie, professor at Texas A&M University Mays Business School, and Scott Graffin, professor at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their article Corporate Directors’ Implicit Theories of the Roles and Duties of Boards. In this interview-based study, Boivie and Graffin, along with co-authors Michael Withers and Kevin Corley, find that contrary to agency-cost theory, corporate directors view their role as supporting, not monitoring, management.

Rebecca Jarvis, ABC News Chief Business, Technology & Economics Correspondent and host of The Dropout podcast, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss what to expect in the criminal trial of former Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

Christina Sautter, professor of law at Louisiana State University, and Sergio Gramitto Ricci, lecturer at Monash University, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their article Corporate Governance Gaming: The Power of Retail Investors. Sautter and Grammito Ricci identify the rise of wireless investors, a cohort of Millennial and Gen Z investors who seek community and emphasize environmental, social, and governance factors. This new kind of investor is poised to shake up corporate governance, they explain, as seen in the “meme stock” phenomenon and growing retail-shareholder bases at companies favored by wireless investors.

Eliot Brown, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his book The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, which he co-authored with fellow reporter Maureen Farrell.

Christine Abely, faculty fellow at New England Law Boston, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Adjusting Pre- and Post-Judgment Interest Rates for Consumer Debt Collection Actions. In this article Abely explains that fixed statutory rates for pre- and post-judgement interest can result in windfalls for creditors that come at the expense of consumer debtors. Because consumers often cannot hedge against this risk—as non-consumer judgment debtors can—Abely recommends legislative reforms to protect consumers from paying above-market judgment interest rates.

Andrea Fried, associate professor at Linköping University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her book Understanding Deviance in a World of Standards. In the book Fried and co-authors explore the rise of standards and standardization across global industries, standardization’s effects on innovation, and the negative and positive aspects of organizational deviation from standards.

Julian Arato, professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article The Elastic Corporate Form in International Law. In this article, Arato confronts a tendency by arbitral panels in investor-state disputes to reach decisions that are inconsistent with domestic corporate laws. Examples include allowing shareholders to press claims for third-party harms to a corporation, something domestic laws ordinarily do not permit. This practice, Arato explains, could increase the cost of capital and thus undermine investment treaties’ goal of fostering efficient investment.

Amelia Miazad, faculty director of the Business in Society Institute at UC Berkeley, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Prosocial Antitrust. Miazad argues that antitrust agencies should become more accommodating to collaboration between competitors in areas of systemic risk, like climate change and environmental protection. Such collaborations could be especially compelling, Miazad explains, if the negative externalities they mitigate are greater than any reductions in consumer welfare.

Patrick Bolton, professor of business at Columbia University; Mitu Gulati, professor of law at the University of Virginia; and Ugo Panizza, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute Geneva, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their article Legal Air Cover. In the article, the authors consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on emerging-market sovereign debt, the risk of concurrent sovereign-debt crises, and potential interventions for managing that scenario.

Elisabeth de Fontenay, professor of law at Duke University and Eric Talley, professor of law at Columbia University, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss Citibank’s mistaken payment of $900M to Revlon lenders, the resulting litigation, and the implications for the future of New York commercial and contract law. De Fontenay is the author of The $900 Million Mistake: In re Citibank August 11, 2020 Wire Transfers (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 16, 2021) and Talley is the organizer of a scholars’ amicus brief in the Second Circuit appeal of the case.

John Coyle, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article Cruise Contracts, Public Policy, and Foreign Forum Selection Clauses, which examines how cruise companies embed forum-selection and choice-of-law clauses in their tickets in an effort to avoid federal law barring damages caps for injured passengers.

Leandra Lederman, professor of tax law at Indiana University Bloomington, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article The Fraud Triangle and Tax Evasion. Lederman uses the fraud triangle, a well-studied topic in the accounting literature that is often missing in other contexts, to frame and examine tax fraud and compliance.