Jennifer Taub Posts on The Race To the Bottom

For the second time in two weeks, we are please to announce another contribututor to The Race To the Bottom.  Jennifer Taub is a Lecturer and Coordinator of the Business Law Program within the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  

Her area of exptertise?  Mutual funds and their role in the governance process.  Before joining academia, she was an Associate General Counsel for Fidelity Investments in Boston and Assistant Vice President for the Fidelity Fixed Income Funds.  At Fidelity, she advised senior management within the Fidelity transfer agents, broker-dealers, investment advisers and other mutual fund administrators on compliance with the federal securities laws. 

Professor Taub began her career in the Trade Practices and Regulatory Law Department at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York.  She graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1993 and earned her undergraduate degree, cum laude, with distinction as an English major from Yale College in 1989.

Since joining academia in 2004, Professor Taub has been an invited guest at several industry and academic conferences. She presented a paper at a comparative corporate governance conference at Oxford University’s Said Business School. She was a discussant at the Sixth Annual "Capital Matters: Managing Labor's Capital Conference" sponsored by the Harvard Law School Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project, Labor and Worklife Program. In addition, she was invited to moderate a workshop at the Mutual Fund Directors Forum. Most recently, she has been selected to present a paper at the Elfenworks Center for the Study of Fiduciary Capitalism at St. Mary’s College of California.

 She begins on The Race to the Bottom with a five part series on the role (or non-role) of mutual funds in the governance process.  Enjoy! 

 Professor Taub has received research funding including a grant from the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance & Performance at the Yale School of Management. She was also awarded an honorarium in connection with a paper she is writing, entitled, “Enablers of Exuberance,” concerning the legal and corporate governance actions and inactions that led to the recent global financial meltdown. Her article “Able but Not Willing: The Failure of Mutual Fund Advisers to Advocate for Shareholders’ Rights,” was published in 2009 in the Journal of Corporation Law. It has been cited (in its working paper form) by leading academics and by the OECD in a paper regarding “Corporate Governance and the Financial Crisis.” In addition, she is coauthoring a book chapter for the Wiley Companion to Finance Ethics series entitled “Ethics in Commercial Bankruptcy.”

The first post is below.  Enjoy.