Ep.104 – Cathy Hwang & Yaron Nili on Cleaning Corporate Governance

Cathy Hwang, professor of law at the University of Virginia, and Yaron Nili, assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their article Cleaning Corporate Governance, which is co-authored with Jens Frankenreiter and Eric Talley. In this article the authors recreate a dataset of public-company charters on which numerous empirical studies have been based, finding a roughly 80% error rate in the prior data. The authors demonstrate the uses of their new dataset with a replication study of Corporate Governance and Equity Prices, a foundational work in empirical corporate governance.

The dataset and its underlying documents are freely available at publiccompanycharters.com.

This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, a teaching fellow and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School.