Robert J. Jackson Jr.

Robert J. Jackson Jr.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr. at a briefing on corporate political spending disclosure.
Born	(1977-02-14) February 14, 1977
Nationality	United States
Fields	Executive Compensation, Corporate Governance, Corporate Finance, Corporate Law
Institutions	Columbia Law School
Alma mater	Harvard Law School (JD) Kennedy School of Government (MPP) The Wharton School (MBA) The Wharton School (BS) The University of Pennsylvania (BA) Pembroke College, Oxford (BA)

Robert J. Jackson, Jr. (born February 14, 1977) is a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School^[1] and Director of the CLS program on Corporate Law and Policy where his research and teaching interests focus primarily on corporate law and securities law, with a particular emphasis on policy-oriented empirical research at the intersection of law, corporate finance, and regulation in the United States.

Professional background

Jackson studied economics and received an MBA from the Wharton School. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 2005, where he trained under Lucian Bebchuk.^[1][2]

Prior to joining the Columbia Law faculty in 2009, he worked in investment banking at Bear Stearns, specialized in executive compensation and corporate governance at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz, and served as deputy director to Kenneth Feinberg at US Treasury, to help establish executive pay rules for corporations such as AIG, Citigroup, and General Motors following the 2008-09 financial crisis. He also developed Obama administration proposals on executive compensation and corporate governance that became part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.^[3]

He received the Columbia Law School 2012 Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and his teaching style is known for its dynamic, engaging, Star Wars-referenced lectures and active engagement with students outside the classroom.^[4] He supervises the research of multiple law school students, which has made an impact in diffuse areas, include gender diversity in the boardroom of corporate America.^[5] He has taught abroad in China,^[6] Italy,^[7] and the Netherlands.^[8]

Research and policy

In November of 2014, Jackson co-authored a paper titled How the SEC Helps Speedy Traders,^[9] which showed how the SEC allowed certain investors early access to key information in public company filings through the SEC's file transfer protocol (FTP) and public dissemination service (PDS). The gaps, 11-seconds and 10-seconds long, allowed investors employing high-frequency trading to make significant profit from this early access. After being reported by the Wall Street Journal,^[10] the Senate Banking Committee urged the SEC to fix the disparity in access,^[11] though Jackson showed that the gap persisted weeks later.^[12]

A paper in September of 2015 uncovered a similar advantage enjoyed by certain traders called The 8-K Trading Gap,^[13] showing that company insiders traded their company's stock on the open market and profited doing so during the 4-day window between when market-moving information is known by company insiders and when they are required to disclose it to the public in an 8-K filing.^[14]

Other research by Jackson has demonstrated The Effects of Usury Laws on Higher-Risk Borrowers,^[15] by showing that when usury laws became enforceable, credit issuance declined for higher-risk borrowers. The implications of this evidence became central during debate around the merits and risks of peer-to-peer lending platforms such as Lending Club,^[16] and Jackson wrote about the benefits of peer-to-peer lending that his research uncovered for The Wall Street Journal.^[17]

Jackson also created CROWN, a Columbia Law School initiative to introduce data science techniques to extract data from legal filings for empirical research.^[18]

Together with Harvard Professor Lucian Bebchuk, Jackson argued that the poison pill was unconstitutional through preemption of state antitakeover laws by the Williams Act.^[19][20]

Also together with Professor Bebchuk, Jackson has advocated for disclosure of corporate political spending in corporations' annual public filings in their paper Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides?^[21] The issue has recently gained media attention, including from President Obama, as Republicans attempt to move a measure through the Senate which would prevent the SEC from requiring such disclosure of political contributions.^[22][23][24]

Personal

Jackson was born in the Bronx, which led to his lifelong interest in baseball and support of the New York Yankees.^[25]

Publications

• The Effects of Usury Laws on Higher-Risk Borrowers, Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 16-38, (2016) (with Colleen Honigsberg and Richard Squire)
• Determinants of Antitrust Enforcement in the European Union: An Empirical Analysis (with Anu Bradford).
• The 8-K Trading Gap (with Alma Cohen and Joshua Mitts) (under review).
• How Quickly Do Markets Learn? Private Information Dissemination in a Natural Experiment (with Wei Jiang and Joshua Mitts) (under review).
• Individual Investors and Mandatory Disclosure: Evidence from the JOBS Act, 93 WASH. U. L. REV. 293 (2015) (with Colleen Honigsberg and Yu-Ting Forester Wong).
• Toward a Constitutional Review of the Poison Pill, 114 COLUM. L. REV. 1549 (2014) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk).
• How the SEC Helps Speedy Traders, Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper No. 501 (2014) (with Joshua Mitts)
• The Hidden Nature of Executive Retirement Pay, 100 VA. L. REV. 479 (2014) (with Colleen Honigsberg).
• Corporate Governance and Executive Compensation: Evidence From Japan, 2014 COLUM. BUS. L. REV. 111 (2014) (with Curtis Milhaupt).
• Pre-Disclosure Accumulations by Activist Investors: Evidence and Policy, 39 J. CORP. L. 1 (2013) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alon Brav and Wei Jiang).
• Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, 101 GEO. L.J. 923 (2013) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk).
• Private Equity and Executive Compensation, 60 U.C.L.A. L. REV. 638 (2013).
• The Law and Economics of Blockholder Disclosure, 1 HARV. BUS. L. REV. 39 (2012) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk).
• Stock Unloading and Banker Incentives, 112 COLUM. L. REV. 951 (2012).
• The Law and Economics of Blockholder Disclosure, Harvard Business L. REV., Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 40-60, (2012) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk).
• Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides?, 124 HARV. L. REV. 83 (2010) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk).
• A New Model of Administrative Enforcement, 93 VA. L. REV. 1983 (2007) (with David Rosenberg).
• A New Method of Random Sampling to Reduce the Cost of Regulatory Monitoring, (2006) Harvard Law and Economics Discussion Paper No. 562 (with David Rosenberg).
• Executive Pensions, 30 J. CORP. L. 102 (2005) (with Lucian A. Bebchuk).
• Note, Rethinking Retroactivity, 118 HARV. L. REV. 1642 (2005).
• Improving Employment Outcomes Through the Massachusetts Parole Board's Regional Reentry Center Initiative: Policy Analysis and Recommendations (April 2005)
• Nine Justices, Ten Years: A Statistical Retrospective, 118 HARV. L. REV. 510 (2004).
• Comment, State Sentencing Guidelines—Sixth Amendment, 118 HARV. L. REV. 333 (2004) (cited in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220, 334 (2005) (Breyer, J., dissenting)).
• Appellate Procedure—Force of Circuit Precedent, 117 HARV. L. REV. 719 (2003).

References