Lucian A. Bebchuk

About

Lucian A. Bebchuk is the James Barr Ames Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School and serves as the Director of the Program on Corporate Governance. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an Inaugural Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Network, and the Director of the SSRN Corporate Governance Network. Trained in both law and economics, Bebchuk holds an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, as well as 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. Bebchuk is recognized as one of the nation's leading scholars in law and economics, with significant contributions to the study of corporate control, governance, and insolvency. He has authored numerous research papers and a widely acclaimed book on executive compensation, and his work has been published in top academic journals across law, economics, and finance. Bebchuk has served as President of the Western Economics Association International and the American Law and Economics Association, and has received several awards for his contributions to corporate governance and financial research. He is actively involved in policy-making, public debate, and advising governmental bodies, and heads the Shareholder Rights Project, which has worked to improve board declassification at major corporations.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Finance
• Business
• Public relations
• Law
• Market economy
• Accounting
• Economics

Selected publications

• Index Funds and the Future of Corporate Governance: Theory, Evidence, and Policy

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-12-01 · 132 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Index funds own an increasingly large proportion of American public companies. The stewardship decisions of index fund managers—how they monitor, vote, and engage with their portfolio companies—can be expected to have a profound impact on the governance and performance of public companies and the economy. Understanding index fund stewardship, and how policymaking can improve it, is thus critical for corporate law scholarship. In this Article we contribute to such understanding by providing a com…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dancing with activists

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2020 · 110 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Specter of the Giant Three

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-06-01 · 46 citations

  report1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers-BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors.We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will come to be dominated by the future "Giant Three."We begin by analyzing the drivers of the rise of the Big Three, including the structural factors that are leading to the heavy concentration of the index funds sec…

  PublisherDOI

• Dancing With Activists

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-08-01 · 6 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  An important milestone often reached in the life of an activist engagement is entering into a "settlement" agreement between the activist and the target's board. Using a comprehensive handcollected data set, we analyze the drivers, nature, and consequences of such settlement agreements. Settlements are more likely when the activist has a credible threat to win board seats in a proxy fight and when incumbents' reputation concerns are stronger. Consistent with incomplete contracting, face-saving b…

  PublisherDOI

• The Specter of the Giant Three

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Alma Cohen

  Harvard University Press

  136 shared

• Jesse M. Fried

  European Corporate Governance Institute

  108 shared

• Itay Goldstein

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  55 shared

• Zvika Neeman

  51 shared

• Alon Brav

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  46 shared

• Marcel Kahan

  44 shared

• Wei Jiang

  Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  43 shared

• Kobi Kastiel

  40 shared

Labs

• Program on Corporate GovernancePI

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Inaugural Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Networ…
• International Corporate Governance Network’s Award for Excel…
• Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute’s best aca…
• Marshall Blume prize in financial research