About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

2023 Colum. Bus. L. Rev. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/colb2023 and id is 1 raw text is: CORPORATE LIABILITY, COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCES, AND CAPITAL STRUCTURE Nathan Atkinson* Financial penalties imposed on malfeasant corporations can produce collateral consequences, or unintended negative impacts on employees, customers, and society more broadly. I show that the vast majority of government bodies that assess organizational penalties have adopted policies to reduce corporate liability where collateral consequences might otherwise result. Moreover, I demonstrate that officials do reduce penalties in line with these policies, undermining deterrence and compensation of harmed parties. However, evidence from reductions given to publicly-traded firms suggests that officials are often wrong in their assessment of firms' financial health, thereby awarding reductions to healthy firms where collateral consequences are unlikely to occur. I discuss how officials should approach imposing penalties when they are concerned about prospective collateral consequences. I. Introduction...........................................................................2 * University of Wisconsin. Thank you to Anat Admati, Abhay Aneja, Jennifer Arlen, Ronen Avraham, Steve Callander, Scott Ganz, Jacob Goldin, Colleen Honigsberg, Curtis Milhaupt, Michael Ohlrogge, Paul Pfleiderer, Mitch Polinsky, George Triantis, Aneesh Raghunandan, Michael Sarinsky, Alan Schwartz, Kathy Spier, Alex Stremitzer, and seminar participants at George Mason Law School, Stanford Law and Economics Free Lunch, Oxford Faculty of Law, University of Texas Law School, ETH Zurich Center for Law and Economics, University of Wisconsin Law School, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, the JLFA conference (NYU, 2019), the Law and Economic Theory Conference (Texas, 2019), and the European Association of Law and Economics Conference (2020) for helpful comments and discussions. Thank you to Cindy Alexander and Mark Cohen for sharing data. This project uses data from the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First's Violation Tracker. Contact: natkinson@wisc.edu

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most