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There is a new face on an old problem — American companies “moving” overseas in part to avoid U.S. taxes — that has increased in popularity in the last several years and recently gained political attention. Last week President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew called for tax reform to encourage economic patriotism and to deter corporate defectors, calling the overseas moves legal, but immoral.

Two structural features of the U.S. tax code incentivize corporations to move abroad. The U.S. corporate tax rate, at 35 percent, is high compared to the average Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) rate of 25 percent, and the average European Union rate of 21 percent. Many corporations effectively pay much less than 35 percent, after factoring in loopholes and deductions, policies that cost approximately $150 billion in untaxed revenue last year. But the reported tax rate is high compared to other jurisdictions and the complexity required to reduce that rate in practice also is a deterrent.

Second, other countries like the United Kingdom become attractive foreign tax locations because they operate under a territorial system that does not tax profits earned outside of the home country. Under the U.S. system, however, returning…

This week, two of my co-bloggers shared some great insights on the revamped American Apparel board of directors.  See Marcia Narine quoted in The Guardian article American Apparel adds its first woman to revamped board of directors; Joan Heminway, American Apparel 1, NFL 0. For those not following the American Apparel saga, the New York Times recently reported:

The founder and chief executive of American Apparel, Dov Charney, was fired this week because an internal investigation found that he had misused company money and had allowed an employee to post naked photographs of a former female employee who had sued him, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation. 

Beyond the public relations problems surrounding Charney’s departure, American Apparel is struggling financially as sales have dropped dramatically. As an initial step in trying start a turnaround, the company announced four new board members, including the company’s first female director, Colleen Birdnow Brown, former chief executive of Fisher Communications. 

When I opened the Guardian article quoting Marcia, I had another article open in the tab next to it from the Washington Post’s On Leadership section: For women and minorities, advocating for diversity has a downside.  That article explained:

In corporate America, diversity is about as controversial as motherhood and apple pie. CEOs love to tout the number of women in their upper ranks. Human resource departments like to trumpet their diversity programs in glossy reports.

But a new study finds that for female and minority executives, being seen as an advocate for diversity could actually have a downside. The researchers behind the study, which will be presented at the Academy of Management’s annual conference in early August, found that women and minorities who were rated by their peers as being good at managing diverse groups or respecting gender or racial differences also tended to get lower performance ratings. That’s because they may be viewed as “selfishly advancing the social standing of their own low-status demographic groups,” the researchers write, a no-no when it comes to rating good managers.

Please click below to read more.

As many readers (and all of my friends) know, I am a bit of a sports fan.  Having been a college athlete (field hockey, at Brown University, for trivia buffs), I focus most of my attention on college games.  I even served on The University of Tennessee’s Athletics Board for a few years.  But my Dad and I used to watch professional football and baseball a lot together when I was a kid (still do, when we are in the same place at the right time), so I also maintain a casual interest in professional sports.

I also have an interest in fashion, especially women’s fashion (maybe less well known, except by close friends).  I have friends in the industry and find aspects of it truly fascinating.  I even used to subscribe to Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion industry trade rag.  I am the faculty advisor to the College of Law’s Fashion and Business (FAB) Law student organization.

This personal background is prelude to my interest in two current events stories that I see as parallels.  I am trying to sort them through on a number of levels. Maybe you can help.  Here are the top lines of each story.

  • Last Thursday, the National Football League (NFL) suspended Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for two games, fined him $58,000 dollars, and asked him to seek counseling after its investigation of an incident relating to a video in which Rice was depicted dragging his then-fiance, now wife, by her hair after punching her in the face (allegedly rendering her unconscious).
  • The very same day, American Apparel (AA) announced a new slate of directors who will assume positions on the AA board in early August as a result of investor intervention and a boardroom blood bath following on lagging profits and continuing investigations of allegations of sexual misconduct (most of it, as I understand it, not new news) against AA’s founder and former CEO and director, Dov Charney, whose management roles at the firm were suspended by the board back in June.

I have posted an updated draft of my latest piece, “Corporate Social Responsibility & Concession Theory” (forthcoming __ Wm. & Mary Bus. L. Rev. __) on SSRN (here). Here is the abstract:

This Essay examines three related propositions: (1) Voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) fails to effectively advance the agenda of a meaningful segment of CSR proponents; (2) None of the three dominant corporate governance theories – director primacy, shareholder primacy, or team production theory – support mandatory CSR as a normative matter; and, (3) Corporate personality theory, specifically concession theory, can be a meaningful source of leverage in advancing mandatory CSR in the face of opposition from the three primary corporate governance theories. In examining these propositions, this Essay makes the additional claims that Citizens United: (A) supports the proposition that corporate personality theory matters; (B) undermines one of the key supports of the shareholder wealth maximization norm; and (C) highlights the political nature of this debate. Finally, I note that the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision does not undermine my CSR claims, contrary to the suggestions of some commentators.

I expect to have at least one more meaningful round of edits, so all comments…

As many have celebrated or decried, Dodd-Frank turned four-years old this week. This is the law that Professor Stephen Bainbridge labeled “quack federal corporate governance round II” (round I was Sarbanes-Oxley, as labeled by Professor Roberta Romano). Some, like Professor Bainbridge, think the law has gone too far and has not only failed to meet its objectives but has actually caused more harm than good (see here, for example).  Some think that the law has not gone far enough, or that the law as drafted will not prevent the next financial crisis (see here, for example). The Council on Foreign Relations discusses the law in an accessible manner with some good links here.

SEC Chair Mary Jo White has divided Dodd-Frank’s ninety-five mandates into eight categories. She released a statement last week touting the Volcker Rule, the new regulatory framework for municipal advisors, additional controls on broker-dealers that hold customer assets, reduced reliance on credit ratings, new rules for unregulated derivatives, additional executive compensation disclosures, and mechanisms to bar bad actors from securities offerings. 

Notwithstanding all of these accomplishments, only a little over half of the law is actually in place. In fact, according to the…

Steven Davidoff Solomon, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, has an interesting article on antitrust in the DealBook today:  Changing Old Antitrust Thinking for a New Gilded Age. Professor Solomon argues that a new wave of mergers in the tech and telecommunications industries mirror the consolidation wave of the Gilded Age a century ago which lead to our current antitrust laws.  These mergers leave competition in tact, albeit among a few huge companies, and therefore facially meet the competition requirements under antitrust law.  He argues that “[t]his calculus, however, excludes the political and other power that a concentrated industry can wield with government and regulators.”  Citing to industry-based nonprofits and the ability to participate in political spending in a post-Citizens United world, professor Solomon concludes that antitrust may become a question of power, not just competition. 

“[R]ight now there is simply no real government ability to review the industry consolidation that is occurring today in which industries become dominated by a handful of major players. Yet it is becoming increasingly apparent that size and industry concentration affect American society even if competition still exists.”

I think that this is an interesting lens through which…

Amazon BBB Book Cover
You may think of Warren Buffett as a savvy stock picker but his greater accomplishment is in configuring an exceptionally strong corporation that defies widespread conceptions of effective corproate governance.  

Since early in his career, Buffett adopted what he calls the double-barreled approach to capital allocation, meaning both stock picking and business buying. He gained prominence primarily as an investor in stocks, championing a contrarian investment philosophy.

Attracting three generations of devoted followers to a school of thought called “value investing,” he doubted the market’s efficiency and deftly exploited it. Buffett bought stocks of good companies at a fair price, assembling a concentrated portfolio of large stakes in a small number of firms. Today, nearly three-fourths of Berkshire’s stock portfolio consists of just seven stocks.     

But late in his career, beginning around 2000, Buffett shot more often through the other half of his double-barreled approach: buying 100 percent of companies run by trusted managers given great autonomy. True, Berkshire early on bought all the stock of companies such as Buffalo News and See’s Candies. But, through the 1990s, the first barrel dominated, with Berkshire consisting 80 percent of stocks and 20 percent owned companies. That mix gradually reversed and recently flipped, making subsidiary ownership the defining characteristic of today’s Berkshire.

Owning primarily subsidiaries rather than merely stocks gives Berkshire a different shape compared to its previous character as the holding company of a famed investor. After all, even for a buy-and-hold investor, stocks come and go. Berkshire has sold the stocks of many once-fine companies, including Freddie Mac, McDonald’s, and The Walt Disney Company.

In contrast, aside from a few Berkshire subsidiaries that it acquired from the Buffett Partnership in the 1970s, Berkshire has never sold a subsidiary and vows to retain them through thick and thin.  Despite their variety, moreover, Berkshire companies are remarkably similar when it comes to corporate culture, which is the central discovery I document and elaborate in my upcoming book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.

When Berkshire consisted mostly of the stock portfolio of a famed stock picker, you could expect that, once that investor departed, the portfolio would naturally be unwound and the company dissolved. Now, however, with Berkshire made of companies not stocks, its life expectancy stretches out in multiple decades, not mere years. It certainly goes beyond the stock picker who founded it.  That’s not an accident either, as the dominant cultural motif at Berkshire and its subsidiaries is a sense of permanence–the longest possible time horizon imaginable.   

As I promised on Friday, I am posting a question and answer segment with Larry Cunningham, author of the forthcoming book: Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.  Larry will be guest blogging with us this week to talk more about the interesting findings he shares in the book and their implications for business and the research, teaching, and practice of business law.

Q:  Why did you write this book and what did you find?

A:  Widespread praise for Warren Buffett has become paradoxical: Buffett set out to build a permanent institution at Berkshire Hathaway and yet even great admirers, such as Steven Davidoff, doubt that the company can survive without him. I found that viewpoint intriguing since companies who are identified with iconic founders often have trouble after a succession, as Tom Lin has written.  I wanted to investigate how the situation will look for Berkshire after Buffett leaves the scene, collapse and breakup or prosperity coupled with continued expansion? What I found was a culture so distinctive and strong, that the company’s future is bright well beyond Buffett.

Q:  How did you reach that conclusion?  What was your research method?

A:  I focused on Berkshire’s fifty…

Cross-post alert!

At the risk of overdoing what may have been a good thing, I contributed a disclosure-oriented post to the Hobby Lobby symposium on The Conglomerate earlier today.  It includes new information about a U.S. Department of Labor Q&A posted yesterday, among other things.  Enjoy or not, as you so please . . . .

The Business Law Prof Blog is delighted to have as a guest blogger next week our friend and colleague Lawrence A. Cunningham (known to me as Larry!), of George Washington University Law School, who has just finished writing a new book being released in October called Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.  He will offer a few posts about aspects of the book during the week. We will kick it off Monday with some questions and answers.   

Larry is the Henry St. George Tucker III Research Professor at GW.  He teaches accounting, contracts, and corporate governance and has written extensively in all those areas.  He previously taught at Boston College Law School, where he served a term as Academic Dean, and Cardozo Law School, where he directed the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Center on Corporate Governance.

Among his most cited articles are these scholarly jewels:

A Prescription to Retire the Rhetoric of “Principles-Based Systems” in Corporate Law, Securities Regulation and Accounting (Vanderbilt Law Review, 2007)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Yawn Heavy Rhetoric, Light Reform (And it Might Just Work) (Connecticut Law Review, 2003)

From Random Walks to Chaotic Crashes: The Linear Genealogy of the …