Business Scholarship Podcast

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Daniel Hamilton, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School.

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.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School.