Margaret Blair
Margaret Blair is an economist who focuses on corporate law and finance. She is a Professor of Law (Emerita) and the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise (Emerita) at Vanderbilt University. Her current research focuses on five areas: team production and the role of corporate boards of directors, the legal concept of "personhood," the historical treatment of corporations by the Supreme Court, the role of private-sector governance arrangements in contract enforcement, and the problem of excessive leverage in financial markets.
Corporate Governance
Two Years After the Business Roundtable Statement: Pointing in the Right Direction
The 2019 Business Roundtable statement was a welcome break from the position that the nation’s top corporate CEOs took in 1997, when...
Friedman 50 Years Later
Corporations Are Governance Mechanisms, Not Shareholder Toys
Milton Friedman’s shareholder credo is simple and catchy but has shaky foundations. Corporate directors and officers are not agents of shareholders and...
Latest news
Antitrust and Competition
Should The Competitive Process Test Replace The Consumer Welfare Standard?
Jonathan Kanter, Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, recently gave a speech condemning the use of the consumer...
News
Delaware: The State Where Companies Can Vote
Adapted from What’s the Matter with Delaware: How the First State Has Favored the Rich, Powerful, and Criminal—and How It Costs Us...
Antitrust and Competition
The NCAA Goes After College Athletes’ NIL Money—Here are the Antitrust Implications for Workers and Consumers
Having lost in the Supreme Court on student-athlete academic benefits, the NCAA has signaled a continuing attempt to suppress competition in the...
Corporate Governance
Have Business Roundtable Companies Lived Up to Their Stakeholder Commitments? Â
In 2019, more than 100 CEOs of US public companies signed a Business Roundtable statement in which they pledged to deliver value...
Inequality
Do Protests Matter At All for Shifting Government Policy Around Economic Redistribution?
New research on the effectiveness of protests on government distributions provides insights into the political incentives of a country’s leadership and the...
Antitrust and Competition
Mergers and Smoking Guns
A recently uncovered memo from George Stigler and Richard Posner reveals how they thought about antitrust and merger policy in advising the...
Corporate Governance
Will “Portfolio Primacy” Throw a Monkey Wrench in Elon Musk’s Plans to Acquire Twitter?
The SEC's definition of fiduciary duty allows institutional shareholders to vote against Elon Musk's Twitter takeover bid thanks to portfolio primacy.
