The Deal Decade Handbook

In this companion handbook to The Deal Decade: What Takeovers and Leveraged Buyouts mean for Corporate Governance, Margaret Blair and Girish Uppal present summary statistics and details on the corporate restructuring movement of the 1980s. The authors summarize data from private buyouts, junk bond issuances, and aggregate changes in corporate debt. They also report on the changing patterns of corporate ownership, shareholder activism, and changes in the law affecting takeovers. Finally, they put the 1980s into historical context by presenting data tracking merger and acquisition activity since 1955.

For decades, the public company has played a dominant role in the American economy. Since the middle of the 20th century, the nature of the public company has changed considerably. The transformation has been a fascinating one, marked by scandals, political controversy, wide swings in investor and public sentiment, mismanagement, entrepreneurial verve, noisy corporate "raiders" and various other larger-than-life personalities. Nevertheless, amidst a voluminous literature on corporations, a systematic historical analysis of the changes that have occurred is lacking. The Public Company Transformed correspondingly analyzes how the public company has been recast from the mid-20th century through to the present day, with particular emphasis on senior corporate executives and the constraints affecting the choices available to them. The chronological point of departure is the managerial capitalism era, which prevailed in large American corporations following World War II. The book explores managerial capitalism's rise, its 1950s and 1960s heyday, and its fall in the 1970s and 1980s. It describes the American public companies and executives that enjoyed prosperity during the 1990s, and the reversal of fortunes in the 2000s precipitated by corporate scandals and the financial crisis of 2008. The book also considers the regulation of public companies in detail, and discusses developments in shareholder activism, company boards, chief executives, and concerns about oligopoly. The volume concludes by offering conjectures on the future of the public corporation, and suggests that predictions of the demise of the public company have been exaggerated.

Communication technologies change the way we live our lives-the ways we communicate and share information, the news, and our entertainment. The new millennium promises to bring some of the most volatile activity in the history of communications, as we continue to be bombarded by new standards and technologies. The near frenzy of corporate mergers and acquisitions accelerates technological development and can provide hints of what is to come. With the rapid appearance of new protocols, standards, and tools, it becomes increasingly difficult -and increasingly important-for communications professionals to remain up-to-date on new and emerging technologies. The Handbook of Emerging Communications Technologies: The Next Decade fills this gap. Until now, information on many of its topics, such as Multiprotocol over ATM, IP Multicasting, and RSVP, existed only as fragmented articles on the Internet or as complex feature specifications. In this landmark volume, 18 leading authorities each tackle one of the cutting edge technologies destined to shape the future. Each chapter Describes a technology and any standards on which it is based Discusses its impact on the communications field Forecasts its future direction Developed primarily for telecommunications specialists network managers, developers, and analysts, the Handbook of Emerging Communications Technologies: The Next Decade, offers the opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of future technologies necessary to remaining current, and serves as a valuable reference guide for corporate executives, planners, and information managers-anyone seeking general knowledge about where the communications industry is heading.

U.S. companies are still reeling from the takeovers, leveraged buyouts, junk bond issues, re-capitalizations, and other financial restructuring transactions that reshaped corporations in the 1980s. In this book, distinguished economists and scholars in the business administration, management, and law discuss how those transactions affected corporate management and the financial markets. The authors examine why so much corporate restructuring occurred and, particularly, what corporate governance problems were behind it. They evaluate the causes and effects of restructuring, the economic, political, and legal environment that encouraged it, and the new laws and court rulings that resulted. The contributors explain that financial restructuring was driven by a dispute over who should control large public corporations, what their goals should be, to whom the organizations and their managers should be accountable, and how to make them more accountable. Although the wave of financial restructuring itself has subsided, this conflict remains unsolved and will continue to influence the business climate. The Deal Decade addresses such issues as: Why did long-dormant questions about corporate performance and governance surface in the 1980s? Why did they manifest themselves in takeovers and financial restructurings? Why would capital structure be likely to affect corporate performance? Were the increased use of debt and rapid pace of innovation in financial markets, and the explosion in takeover activity independent phenomena or related? And if related, which caused which? Finally, why did the impulse to restructure subside without having resolved the controversies that underlay it?

Giving yesterday's words another chance to sparkle before they retire to the archives for good, Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers focuses on language that still resonates with the mood of its times.

The urgent and sustained interest in corporate governance is unprecedented, with the connections between corporate governance and economic performance being emphasized by the World Bank, the IMF and others in the global economic community. In this timely and definitive intellectual analysis of a key discipline, The SAGE Handbook of Corporate Governance offers a critical overview of the key themes, theoretical controversies, current research and emerging concepts that frame the field. Consisting of original substantive chapters by leading international scholars, and examining corporate governance from an inter-disciplinary basis, the text highlights how governance issues are critical to the formation, growth, financing, structural development, and strategic direction of companies and how corporate governance institutions in turn influence the innovation and development of industrial and economic systems globally. Comprehensive, authoritative and presented in a highly-accessible framework, this Handbook is a significant resource to those with an interest in understanding this important emerging field.