March 5-6, 2010 - The Financial Crisis: Can We Prevent a Recurrence? - Conference
The focus of this conference is to bring together a group of knowledgeable academics, regulators and industry participants to work on recognizing and containing systemic risk issues and various ways of limiting this risk, during the conference.
June 23, 2009 - Risk Principles for Fund Directors - Conference
Sponsored by the Mutual Fund Directors Forum and Columbia Law School
Recent market events have illustrated vividly that the risk oversight function of fund boards has never been more complex and critical than it is today. The Forum, in conjunction with Professor Harvey J. Goldschmid and Columbia Law School presented a single day course designed to help provide directors with the tools and references they need to understand and assess risk, and to oversee its management by others.
Professor Goldschmid moderated the panels of independent directors, risk experts, CCOs, and fund professionals who discussed lessons the recent crisis has taught us about risk, and how directors can effectively oversee the development of risk conscious culture both in the boardroom and among their funds' various services providers.
Cross Border Securities Market Mergers Trends, Effects and Development of Appropriate Regulatory Policies
This one day conference is sponsored by the Center for Law and Economic Studies, at the Columbia Law School, and the Program for the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, a joint project of the Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School. It will explore the forces driving cross border securities market merger activity, its implications for the U.S. and world economies, and the challenges it poses for capital market regulation.
The Mutual Fund Directors Forum and Columbia Law School jointly presented this conference meetng.
Program Overview - Harvey Goldschmid, professor of law at Columbia Law School and former SEC Commissioner, facilitated discussions by fund industry experts on funds' use of derivative instruments.
The panels looked into the risk, compliance, and operational issues that face independent mutual fund directors as they oversee their funds' derivatives investment strategy.
Topics of Discussion -
Understanding Deriatives and How Funds Use Them
Risks Associated with Derivatives
Compliance and Disclosure Issues
Valuation and Accounting Isues Associated with Derivatives
75th Anniversary Berle-Means Revisited: A 21st Century Reconsideration of The Modern Corporation and Private Property
December 7, 2007
The Columbia Law School marks the 75th Anniversary of the influential Berle-Means Book The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Adolph A. Berle (the late Columbia Law School Professor) and Gardiner Means, (an economist), in a conference being hosted by Columbia Law School's Center for Corporate Governance and the Center for Law and Economic Studies.
This groundbreaking book on business law is probably the most influential book published in corporate law. This conference will bring together some of the top authorities in corporate law. These proceedings are by invitation only.
The Structure of the Corporation: A Legal Analysis
The Columbia Center for Law and Economic Studies and the Center on Corporate Governance is sponsoring a conference which is a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of Mel Eisenberg's "The Structure of the Corporation: A Legal Analysis," which introduced the concept of the "monitoring Board" into the corporate law lexicon and which had a shaping role in the contemporary conception of corporate governance. Invitation/Registration required.
The Transactional Studies Program at Columbia Law School will host its fourth Deals Roundtable, entitled "Hedge Funds, Creditor Control, and Restructuring," on Friday, October 27, 2006, from 12:00 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., including lunch, to be held at Columbia Law School, 435 West 116th Street (116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue). A reception for all speakers, panelists, and attendees will immediately follow. The Roundtable is designed to bring together prominent academics, practitioners, and policymakers for intensive discussions of important contemporary issues.
The past 15 years have seen dramatic changes in the restructuring process. The players have changed: distressed debt funds now play a central role in all large bankruptcies. The dynamics have changed: debtor-control was the byword of the 1980s; today, creditors dominate the restructuring process through pre-petition credit facilities, debtor-in-possession financing, and other devices. And the outcomes have changed as well: firms in bankruptcy today are more highly leveraged and more likely to be sold off than reorganized.
This Roundtable will focus on these recent developments in the restructuring process, in particular the impact of changes in players and processes on distressed and bankrupt firms. Harvey Miller, a Vice-Chairman at Greenhill & Co., will provide the luncheon address. The Roundtable will include paper presentations by Edward Morrison, Columbia Law School, and Edward Altman, New York University Stern School of Business, and a panel discussion on hedge funds and the reorganization process
Gatekeepers Today: The Professions After The Reforms
The scandals are over (maybe, maybe not?). Sarbanes-Oxley is the law, and other reforms have been implemented. But how much has really changed? The conference panels discussed and debated issues.
This conference on Tort Law and the Modern State will bring together many of the world's most prominent tort scholars representing a range of perspectives and methodologies including comparative, economic, empirical, historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. Conference by invitation only.
A Conference on the Law and Economics of Contracts, was held on Friday, April 7, and Saturday morning, April 8 at Columbia University. The conference was a joint initiative supported by Columbia's School of Law (through the Center for Law and Economic Studies), Graduate School of Business, School of International and Public Affairs, and the Department of Economics.
The general theme of the conference was "the economics of contacts meets the law and economics of contracts" on the view that analysis of the different starting points and focal questions of the two related inquiries can stimulate further research. Core issues examined included the role of breach and the remedies for breach in shaping contract design, judicial practices of interpretation and the judicial supply of default terms, the role of the adversarial litigation system in shaping contracts, and the bargaining process.
China's Emerging Financial Markets: Opportunities and Obstacles
This Roundtable focused on China's emerging financial industry, in particular the impact of inbound investment into China and the role of China's legal and institutional infrastructure.
Business scandals have provoked a sense of crisis in Corporate America. Increasing shareholder power is a common response - in both the media and new regulation - reflecting the view that corporations are better managed if shareholders play a greater role in controlling corporate excess. But does that answer raise its own set of problems?
This symposium focused on the growing role of shareholders in managing public corporations, bringing together prominent academics, policymakers, shareholder representatives, executives, corporate lawyers, business leaders, and reporters to explore in depth the idea of "shareholder democracy" and its costs and benefits.
Traditionally, legal scholarship on corporate governance has focused on how corporations deal with the problems of agency costs in public firms. Increasing shareholder power may be an effective way to reduce those costs. That focus has led to the acceptance of a "shareholder primacy" paradigm that presumes that corporations are run most efficiently when they are run in accordance with shareholder desires.
Nevertheless, academics have begun to explore alternatives to the traditional principal-agent approach. Those alternatives reveal how the principal-agent model fails to address other important economic problems in corporations, including important problems that may be worsened by enhancing shareholder power.
The principal-agent model, for example, presumes that shareholders in public firms have a single common interest. Shareholders in public corporations, however, are a diverse group whose interests often conflict depending on whether they are short-term or long-term investors, whether they are diversified, whether they play other roles in the firm (e.g., as employees or creditors), whether they have "social" preferences or purely economic preferences, and whether they have hedged their economic interest through derivatives contracts. Increasing shareholder power heightens the resulting potential for intra-shareholder conflict. A second failing of the principal-agent model is that it overlooks the importance of firm-specific investments made by stakeholder groups like employees and customers, who can become residual claimants in corporations with interests and vulnerabilities that are economically similar to shareholders. Third, the principal-agent model ignores the problems of negative spillover effects from corporate activities on broader society, assuming instead that they can be controlled through contract and government regulation. If not true, then greater shareholder power can lead to more "socially irresponsible" corporate behavior.
The question of whether greater shareholder power benefits or harms public corporations is far more complex and nuance than the current tone of debate suggests. Participants took a new look at the role of shareholder democracy in the modern corporation.
Interdisciplinary Workshop on Law, Finance and Political Economy The April 23-24, 2004 workshop was hosted by Katarina Pistor and Jeffrey N. Gordon, please click here to go to the conference page. (You will need a username and password to access this page)
