Roberto Tallarita

Roberto Tallarita is a Lecturer on Law and an Associate Director of the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on corporate governance, securities regulation, and law and economics. Roberto's academic papers appear or are forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review, the Harvard Business Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, the Journal of Legal Analysis, the Southern California Law Review, and the Vanderbilt Law Review. He has also published articles for a broader audience in The Atlantic and the Boston Review. His research has been discussed, among other places, in Bloomberg Opinion, the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

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...

How Much Can We Trust Index Funds on Climate Change?

According to a theory that is gaining support among academics and practitioners, we should expect index fund managers to undertake the role...

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...

Latest news

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.

Why the Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is a Mess for Consumers

Grocers Kroger and Albertsons want to merge, which would make them the second biggest retail food chain and, according to them, enhance their ability to compete with Walmart and Costco and offer lower prices to consumers. Christine P. Bartholomew writes that the promises of more competition and lower prices for consumers are unlikely to manifest, and thus the Federal Trade Commission should block the deal.  

After Neoliberalism

The following is an excerpt from Martin Daunton's new book, "The Economic Government of the World: 1933-2023," out November 14.

US Taxpayers Should Not Be Subsidizing Harmful Big Oil Mergers

Chevron and ExxonMobil claim their announced mergers with Hess and Pioneer take advantage of market efficiencies, but a closer look reveals an antiquated tax provision likely sweetening these dangerous deals. Antitrust authorities must carefully review the serious risks entailed in these proposed mergers. In parallel, the United States federal government needs to end large tax-free reorganizations—the most egregious way in which American taxpayers are subsidizing monopolistic practices, writes Niko Lusiani.

Seeing Others

In an excerpt from her new book, Seeing Others, sociologist Michèle Lamont describes the impact of neoliberal ideas on the working class.

How Well Consumers Know Prices Matters for Tax Policy

The effectiveness of tax policy depends on whether sellers pass on changes in tax rates to consumers through changes in price. In new research, Felix Montag, Robin Mamrak, Alina Sagimuldina, and Monika Schnitzer investigate how this tax pass-through in turn depends on how much consumers know about prices. They show that if consumers are not aware of how prices for the same product vary between sellers, then they will be unaffected by tax changes intended to increase or decrease consumption.