An article co-authored by Professor Robert Jackson Jr. was included recently on the Corporate Practice Commentator’s “Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles of 2019” list. Teachers of corporate and securities law voted on a pool of nearly 400 articles published last year.
Jackson, who served on the US Securities and Exchange Commission from 2017 until last February, co-wrote “Activist Directors and Agency Costs: What Happens When an Activist Director Goes on the Board?”, published in the Cornell Law Review. The article employs what it terms “a new and more rigorous methodology” in measuring both informed trading—trading based on information that yields a more accurate valuation of a stock than its current price indicates—and the agency costs of hedge fund activism. Among the findings: the appointment to a corporate board of a director nominated by a hedge fund tends to correspond with an increase in informed trading in the corporation’s stock, especially when the director is a hedge fund employee. The article’s authors also develop a tool to help regulators identify suspicious trading patterns. One of Jackson’s co-authors is Professor John Coffee LLM ’76 of Columbia Law School; Associate Professor Joshua Mitts of Columbia Law School and Robert Bishop, a doctoral student at Yale School of Management, also co-wrote the article.
Over the 25 years that the Corporate Practice Commentator has been compiling its list of best corporate and securities articles, numerous NYU Law faculty members have been recognized, including George T. Lowy Professor of Law Marcel Kahan, Martin Lipton Professor of Law Edward Rock, Murray and Kathleen Bring Professor of Law Stephen Choi, Norma Z. Paige Professor of Law Jennifer Arlen ’86, Professor Ryan Bubb, Professor Emiliano Catan LLM ’10, Stuyvesant P. Comfort Professor of Law Geoffrey Miller, and Professor Daniel Rubinfeld.
Posted August 17, 2020