page_title: Robert J. Jackson Jr.
section_title: Research and policy
hierarchical_section_title: Robert J. Jackson Jr. / Research and policy
caption_attribution_description: English: Senator Elizabeth Warren and Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr. at a briefing on corporate political spending disclosure.
context_page_description: Robert J. Jackson Jr. is an American lawyer and academic. He currently serves as a professor of law at New York University School of Law, where he is on public service leave. Jackson's research emphasizes the empirical study of executive compensation and corporate governance matters. On September 1, 2017, the White House announced that President Donald Trump had nominated Jackson to fill the open Democratic seat on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Jackson was unanimously approved by the Senate Banking Committee for the seat, and thereafter unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on December 21, 2017.
context_section_description: In November 2014, Jackson co-authored a paper titled How the SEC Helps Speedy Traders, 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, the Senate Banking Committee urged the SEC to fix the disparity in access, though Jackson showed that the gap persisted weeks later.
  A paper in September 2015 uncovered a similar advantage enjoyed by certain traders called The 8-K Trading Gap, 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. Recently, this work was cited by Senator Chris Van Hollen before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney before the House Financial Services Committee discussing insider trading in the context of trading by Equifax executives after that company's 2017 hack.
  Other research by Jackson has demonstrated The Effects of Usury Laws on Higher-Risk Borrowers, 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, and Jackson wrote about the benefits of peer-to-peer lending that his research uncovered for The Wall Street Journal. In the opinion piece, Jackson notes that, "borrowers who cannot gain access to marketplace credit will likely choose instead higher-cost sources like credit cards with interest rates as high as 30%, making it harder to repay their debts. And because marketplace lending is subject to price caps but other lending is not, the decision is essentially a protectionist measure, giving banks a monopoly over lending to higher-risk borrowers."
  Jackson also created CROWN, a Columbia Law School initiative to introduce data science techniques to extract data from legal filings for empirical research.
  Together with Harvard professor Lucian Bebchuk, Jackson argued that the poison pill was unconstitutional through preemption of state anti-takeover laws by the Williams Act. They also advocated for disclosure of corporate political spending in corporations' annual public filings in their paper Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides? The issue gained media attention, including from President Barack Obama, as Republicans attempted to move a measure through the Senate which would prevent the SEC from requiring such disclosure of political contributions.
caption: Elizabeth Warren and Jackson at a briefing on corporate political spending disclosure
exif: {"Image Copyright": "Copyright 2013 Jay Mallin. jay@jaymallinphotos.com"}