Paper Abstract
353. Lucian Bebchuk, John Coates IV, and Guhan Subramanian, The Powerful Antitakeover Force of Staggered Boards: Theory, Evidence, and Policy, 03/2002; subsequently published in Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, 2002, 887-951.
Abstract: Staggered boards, which a majority of public companies now have, provide a powerful antitakeover defense, stronger than is commonly recognized. They provide antitakeover protection both by (i) forcing any hostile bidder, no matter when it emerges, to wait at least one year to gain control of the board, and (ii) requiring such a bidder to win two elections far apart in time rather than a one-time referendum on its offer. Using a new data set that includes all hostile bids in the five-year period 1996-2000, we find that not a single hostile bid came close to winning a ballot box victory against an "effective" staggered board (ESB). We also find that an ESB nearly doubles the odds that the average target in our data set will remain independent, from 34% to 61%, halves the odds that a first bidder will be successful, from 34% to 14%, and reduces the odds that our average target will be forced to sell to a white knight, from 32% to 25%. Furthermore, we find that the shareholders of targets that remain independent in our data set are made substantially worse off compared with accepting the bid, and that ESB's do not provide sufficient countervailing benefits in terms of increased premia to offset the increased costs of remaining independent. Overall, our estimates indicate that, in the period that we study, ESB's reduced the expected returns of the shareholders of hostile bid targets by 8-10%. Finally, we show that most staggered boards were adopted before the developments in takeover doctrine that make ESB's such a potent defense. Our findings call for a reconsideration of the rules governing takeover defenses. In particular, we argue that, at least in the absence of explicit should not be allowed to further block the bid with a pill-ESB combination.