Deals Roundtable: Corporations and Capital Markets Evolution

There has been persistent demand for new corporate-governance and -structure models that utilize outside indicators to measure internal performance. Recommendations that rely more on the intrinsic efficiency of the marketplace to sniff out fact from fiction than traditional assessments are gaining acceptance.

 

The Deals Roundtable at Columbia Law School (CLS) traded on the academic research of law, business and economics faculty with the experience of business leaders, judges and government officials. It was an offshoot of the enormously popular Transactional Studies Program, in which Columbia Law and Columbia Business students work together on the art of the deal.

 

The fifth roundtable looked at the latest research on two indicators that might address these requests -- deconstructing equity value and using high risk-markets to test management success.

 

Ronald Gilson, the Marc and Eva Stern Professor of Law and Business at Columbia Law School, and Charles Whitehead of Boston University, presented their paper, “Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, and Complete Financial Markets”, on the risk-bearing role of public equity and the traditional model of the large corporation with comment from Daniel Neff, managing partner, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

 

Jeffrey Gordon, the Alfred W. Bressler Professor of Law  and co-director of the Center for Law and Economics at Columbia Law School, presented “Informative Stock Prices and the Role of Independent Directors”, with comment from Alphonse Fletcher Jr., chairman and CEO of Fletcher Asset Management, Inc. 

 

Harvey Goldschmid, the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, moderated the concluding panel discussion featuring Raanan Agus, head of Goldman Sachs principal strategies group, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, CEO of E L Rothschild LLC, and Annette Nazarety, a commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.