Paul Mahoney to Give Winter Lecture, "Did the SEC Improve Corporate Disclosure?" Feb. 20

Paul G. Mahoney '84, the Brokaw Professor of Corporate Law and Albert C. BeVier Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, will deliver the 2005-06 Judge Ralph K. Winter Lecture on Corporate Law and Governance, on Monday, February 20, 2006, at 4:30 p.m., in the Faculty Lounge. The title of his talk is "Did the SEC Improve Corporate Disclosure? Evidence from the 1930s."

Mahoney will discuss evidence of the effects of the mandatory securities disclosure laws of the 1930s, focusing on whether companies' initial SEC filings had measurable effects on bid-ask spreads, trading volumes, and other liquidity measures.

Mahoney is a graduate of M.I.T. and Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Ralph Winter of the Second Circuit. Mahoney is a former Raben Lecturer here and one of the leading scholars of Corporate Law. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has served as a consultant on legal reform projects in the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Nepal. His research and teaching interests include Securities Regulation, Corporate Finance, Contracts, and Law and Economic Development. His recent publications include "Manager-Investor Conflicts in Mutual funds" in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (2004), "The Origins of the Blue-Sky Laws: A Test of Competing Hypotheses" in the Journal of Law & Economics (2003) and "Market Manipulation: A Comprehensive Study of Stock Pools" (with Guolin Jiang and Jianping Mei) in the Journal of Financial Economics (2005).