Business Scholarship Podcast

Omari Scott Simmons, professor of law at Wake Forest University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article Political Risk Management. In this article Simmons locates political risk as a subset of enterprise risk management and analyzes its role in the contemporary business environment. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Samantha Prince, assistant professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers' Retirement Wealth. In this article Prince problematizes the use of vesting schedules in employer-sponsored 401(k) plans, especially at companies with employee-churn rates that make it likely that few employees ever actually receive promised 401(k) matching contributions. Given the disproportionate number of people of color working in such high-churn positions, Prince observes that the 401(k)-vesting problem has downstream effects on racial wealth inequality. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

Brian Feinstein, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article In-Group Favoritism as Legal Strategy: Evidence from FCPA Settlements, which he co-authored with William Heaston and Guilherme Siqueira de Carvalho. In this article, the authors offer empirical findings that corporate targets of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement tend to hire Democratic attorneys during Democratic administrations and vice versa during Republican administrations. This finding, in turn, raises questions about the potential role of in-group identity and homophily and the integrity of white-collar enforcement. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

Joan MacLeod Heminway, professor of law at the University of Tennessee, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Criminal Insider Trading in Personal Networks. In this article, Heminway investigates insider trading occurring in the context of friendship, familial, or romantic relationships and presents findings from her empirical study of this friends-and-family insider trading. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

Giovanni Patti, head of research for the Securities Enforcement Empirical Database (SEED) at NYU, and Peter Robau, senior professional fellow at NYU’s Pollack Center for Law & Business, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss their article SEC Regional Offices. In the article Patti and Robau present the history of the SEC’s eleven regional offices, including their pragmatic and ideological origins, the gradual centralization of the SEC’s enforcement policy, and new developments in regional specialization. Patti and Robau use data from SEED to extend this historical account and situate the regional SEC offices in the literature on regional administration of federal power. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

Andrew Granato, executive editor and empirical scholarship editor of the Yale Journal on Regulation; John Bowers, empirical scholarship editor of the Yale Law Journal; and Arisa Herman, senior articles editor of the Cornell Law Review, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss the state of empirical legal scholarship and the recently announced Joint Law Review Statement on Data and Code Transparency. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Marc Steinberg, professor of law at SMU, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article To Call a Donkey a Racehorse — The Fiduciary Duty Misnomer in Corporate and Securities Law. In this article Steinberg considers the rhetoric and reality of corporate fiduciary duty and concludes that directors, officers, and controlling shareholders are not fiduciaries strictly speaking but rather should be understood as having corporate-law-specific duties. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

Allison Herren Lee, former commissioner and acting chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; Anat Alon-Beck, assistant professor of law at Case Western Reserve University; and John Livingstone, research fellow at Case Western Reserve University, join the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss special-purpose vehicles and the divide in public and private markets. Alon-Beck and Livingstone are the authors of Mythical Unicorns and How to Find Them: The Disclosure Revolution. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

Jennifer Fan, professor of law at the University of Washington, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article The Landscape of Startup Corporate Governance in the Founder-Friendly Era. In this article, Fan offers an empirical investigation of startup boards, including their governance models at different lifecycle and economic stages and their distinctions from public-company boards. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.

George Georgiev, associate professor of law at Emory University, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss his article The Human Capital Management Movement in U.S. Corporate Law. In this article Georgiev gives an account of the move toward understanding workers as essential “assets” of a corporation, which in turn requires boards to consider workforces within their monitoring and oversight responsibilities. He evaluates recent SEC regulations mandating human-capital management (HCM) disclosures and previews future HCM regulatory developments. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.