Excerpt
February 22, 2022, Paper: "In a study we recently released on SSRN, Stakeholder Capitalism in the Time of Covid, we use the COVID-19 pandemic to test the claims of supporters of stakeholder capitalism empirically. The pandemic was preceded and accompanied by peak support for stakeholder capitalism, with corporate leaders broadly pledging to look after the interests of stakeholders. Our investigation, however, casts doubt on whether such rhetoric was matched by actions. We conduct a detailed examination of more than 100 public company acquisitions, with an aggregate value exceeding $700 billion, that were announced during the first twenty months of the pandemic. We find that the contractual terms of those acquisitions provided large gains for target shareholders and corporate leaders themselves. However, even though the pandemic heightened risks for stakeholders, corporate leaders negotiated for little or no stakeholder protections."
Non-HKS Harvard Author Website - Lucian Bebchuk