Academic

I'm ba-ack

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

I've been under a vow of blogging silence these past few weeks, working feverishly to get a draft done. It went out Tuesday, and I'm happy to be back in the blogosphere. I'll use the next few posts to talk about what I've been working on.

My new piece looks at a basic question: do public companies comply with our securities laws? When you think about it, our whole securities system is based on voluntary compliance. Companies are supposed to disclose facts about executive compensation, material agreements, related party transactions, etc. And we generally presume that they do. But we really have no way of knowing. Most securities lawyers or scholars have at some point run across an annoying instance of non-disclosure. They're looking for a big agreement they know the company entered into, but they can't find it. They think: "Shouldn't the company have dislosed this agreement to the SEC? Why isn't it here?" But it's hard to study what isn't disclosed because...it isn't disclosed.

My co-author, Mike Stegemoller, and I think we've found a way around this problem, at least for a narrow slice of the securities disclosure world. Tune it tomorrow to learn more...or, if the suspense is too much for you, download the article here.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).