Snapchat\u27s Gift: Equity Culture in High-Tech Firms

Snap, Inc., the company that owns the platform Snapchat, controbersially offered nonvoting common shares to the public in 2017. This Article asks what it means to invest in Snap or other (mostly technology-based) companies in which common shareholders collectibely have little or no power to influence corporate policy. In particular, why do such investors expect to be compensated? This Article explores the familiar rationales for equity investing, including stock appreciation and dividends, and the logical shortcomings of those rationales in these circumstances. Adopting Henry Manne\u27s two systems approach to corporate affairs through both law and economics, we show that corporation law fails to ensure that corporations return business profits to shareholders. A similar analysis of the market for corporate control concludes that, without shareholder boting, the market for corporate control also fails to ensure a return to shareholders. Shareholders who invest in firms in the absence of legal or market mechanisms to secure a return on their inbestment, howeber, are not irrational. Instead, inbestors rely on cultural understandings of appropriate reciprocity. This Article employs Marcel Mauss\u27s cultural anthropology classic, The Gift, to explain the equity culture in which shareholders invest in Snap and other high-technology firms, and in which such firms operate. This Article concludes by suggesting some ramifications of understanding shareholding, and consequently management, in terms of equity culture. This Article also complements the substantial work of behabioral economics in explaining inbestor choice and organizational behabiors. The field of corporate finance traditionally has been organized around the figure of the rationally self-interested indibidual. Behabioral economics argues that people are not as rational as orthodox corporate finance assumes. This Article argues that people in markets are not as individual as corporate finance assumes

Snapchat\u27s Gift: Equity Culture in High-Tech Firms

Snap, Inc., the company that owns the platform Snapchat, controversially offered nonvoting common shares to the public in 2017. This Article asks what it means to invest in Snap or other (mostly technology-based) companies in which common shareholders collectibely have little or no power to influence corporate policy. In particular, why do such investors expect to be compensated? This Article explores the familiar rationales for equity investing, including stock appreciation and dividends, and the logical shortcomings of those rationales in these circumstances. Adopting Henry Manne\u27s two systems approach to corporate affairs through both law and economics, we show that corporation law fails to ensure that corporations return business profits to shareholders. A similar analysis of the market for corporate control concludes that, without shareholder boting, the market for corporate control also fails to ensure a return to shareholders. Shareholders who invest in firms in the absence of legal or market mechanisms to secure a return on their investment, however, are not irrational. Instead, investors rely on cultural understandings of appropriate reciprocity. This Article employs Marcel Mauss\u27s cultural anthropology classic, The Gift, to explain the equity culture in which shareholders invest in Snap and other high-technology firms, and in which such firms operate. This Article concludes by suggesting some ramifications of understanding shareholding, and consequently management, in terms of equity culture. This Article also complements the substantial work of behavioral economics in explaining investor choice and organizational behaviors. The field of corporate finance traditionally has been organized around the figure of the rationally self-interested individual. Behavioral economics argues that people are not as rational as orthodox corporate finance assumes. This Article argues that people in markets are not as individual as corporate finance assumes

Unicorns, Guardians, and the Concentration of the U.S. Equity Markets

I. Introduction II. The Republican Equity Market of the Twentieth Century ... A. Law as Response to Marketplace Power in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries ... B. Corporation Law and the Threat to the Republic ... C. Securities Law, Disclosure, and Bureaucratization … D. Participation III. Private Equity Markets ... A. Introduction ... B. The Rise of the Private Equity Market and the Relative Decline of the Initial Public Offering Market ... C. Reasons for the Rise of the Private Equity Market and the Decline of the Initial Public Offering Market ... 1. Cost ... 2. Deep, Nonpublic Pools of Capital ... 3. Interest Rate Environment … 4. Modest Capital Requirements of New Businesses ... D. Requiem for the Public Equity Market? IV. The Contemporary Public Equity Markets ... A. Introduction ... B. Rise of the Institutional Investor ... C. The Shift from Actively Managed to Passively Managed Funds ... D. Possible Consequences of Institutional-Investor Dominance ... E. Guardians V. Conclusio

Bose-Einstein condensation of metastable helium: some experimental aspects

We describe our recent realization of BEC using metastable helium. All detection is done with a micruchannel plate which detects the metastables or ions coming from the trapped atom cloud. This discussion emphasizes some of the diagnostic experiments which were necessary to quantitatively analyse our results.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Theory and observations of ice particle evolution in cirrus using Doppler radar: evidence for aggregation

Vertically pointing Doppler radar has been used to study the evolution of ice particles as they sediment through a cirrus cloud. The measured Doppler fall speeds, together with radar-derived estimates for the altitude of cloud top, are used to estimate a characteristic fall time tc for the `average' ice particle. The change in radar reflectivity Z is studied as a function of tc, and is found to increase exponentially with fall time. We use the idea of dynamically scaling particle size distributions to show that this behaviour implies exponential growth of the average particle size, and argue that this exponential growth is a signature of ice crystal aggregation.Comment: accepted to Geophysical Research Letter