Lucian Bebchuk

Lucian Bebchuk serves as the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance, and the Founding Director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. Bebchuk is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inaugural Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Network, and Director of the SSRN Corporate Governance Network. Trained in both law and economics, Professor Bebchuk holds an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Harvard Economics Department. His research focuses on corporate governance, law and finance, and law and economics. Upon electing him to membership in 2000, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences cited him as "[o]ne of the nation's leading scholars of law and economics," who "has made major contribution to the study of corporate control, governance, and insolvency." He currently serves as Senior Advisor to Dimensional Fund Advisors.

How the Start-Up Nation Could Fail

Lucian Bebchuk and Oliver Hart explain why Israel’s proposed legal transformation would undermine not only its democracy but also its economy.

Twitter’s Corporate Leaders Pushed their Stakeholders under the (Musk) Bus

In a new study, we examine whether, in negotiating the sale to Elon Musk, Twitter’s corporate leaders took into account the commitments...

Have Business Roundtable Companies Lived Up to Their Stakeholder Commitments?  

In 2019, more than 100 CEOs of US public companies signed a Business Roundtable statement in which they pledged to deliver value...

How Enlightened is Enlightened Shareholder Value?

There has been growing support for replacing the traditional corporate purpose with so-called “enlightened shareholder value,” which would guide firms to consider...

The Flaws and Limits of ESG-Based Compensation

Companies increasingly use ESG metrics in their compensation packages for CEOs. A new empirical study suggests that this practice has questionable promise...

How the Covid-19 Pandemic Put Corporate Stakeholder Promises to the Test

Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, corporate leaders pledged to look after all stakeholders, not just deliver value to shareholders. Did they...

For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargained: What the Past Can Teach Us About the Questionable Promise of Implementing Stakeholder Capitalism Today

The debate about stakeholder capitalism should seek to learn from our experience with constituency statutes, which authorized corporate leaders to take into...

The Illusory Promise of “Stakeholderism”: Why Embracing Stakeholder Governance Would Fail Stakeholders

Stakeholderism—granting corporate leaders discretion to give weight to the interest of all stakeholders—should not be expected to deliver its purported benefits to...

Towards the Giant Three: The Rise and Rise of the Big Three Index Funds

The Big Three index fund managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors—hold a significant proportion of the stock of US public companies, and they...

Latest news

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.

We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry

Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.

Debating the Draft Merger Guidelines: Transcript

On September 7, the Stigler Center hosted a webinar to discuss the draft merger guidelines. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of the event.

Holding Up the News

Meta has silenced news organizations’ social media accounts in response to Canada’s Online News Act, a law not yet in effect. Josh Braun describes the reasoning behind such legislation, its potential flaws, and how Meta, particularly Facebook, has turned the Canadian wildfire crisis into a regulatory pressure campaign.

Split the Legal, Economic and Policy Arguments of the Draft Merger Guidelines

To support the Agencies’ goals of stronger antitrust enforcement, Fiona Scott Morton recommends breaking the draft Merger Guidelines into three documents that clarify the Guidelines’ legal and economic justifications and overarching goals and priorities.

Randy Picker: A Brief for the Public?

Randy Picker provides his round-two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.