The Canadian Law and Economics Association
Annual Meeting
September 26th and 27th, 2008
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
CLEA Public Lecture
Professor Bernard Black
Hayden W. Head Regents Chair for Faculty Excellence
Professor of Finance, McCombs School of Business
Director, Center for Law, Business, and Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Identification Strategies in Corporate Governance Research
Friday, September 26, 2008
1:30 - 2:30 PM
Bennett Lecture Hall
78 Queen's Park
University of Toronto
Abstract: Identification (does governance cause changes in firm value or performance) is a hard, recurring problem in corporate governance research. The core problem is that optimal governance likely differs across firms, and the same factors that predict share price and performance may well predict governance. Some of these factors are observable, but important ones may not be. I survey here the nature of this endogeneity problem, what we know about how serious it is, and a number of strategies which researchers have used to address it, with an emphasis on strategies that rely on legal rules to provide identification.
For more information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
The Canadian Law & Economics Association wishes to thank the Bank of Canada for its
generous support of the CLEA 2008 conference.
