CLEA Conference: PUBLIC LECTURE

THE 2008 MEETINGS OF

THE CANADIAN LAW AND ECONOMICS ASSOCIATION

SEPTEMBER 26 – 27, 2008

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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 – Flavelle House
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
78 Queen’s Park

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