2025 Working Paper Prizes

The European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) is delighted to announce the winners of the best papers in the Working Paper Finance and Law Series’ published in 2024.

The 2025 ECGI Law Prize for the Best Paper in the ECGI Law Working Paper Series has been awarded to Katja Langenbucher (Goethe University Frankfurt, SciencesPo, Fordham Law School and ECGI) for her paper: “Ownership and Trust: A corporate law framework for board decision-making in the age of AI” (ECGI Law Working Paper 758/2024).

The paper explores how the principles of corporate law—especially the notions of board ownership and judicial trust—should adapt in response to the growing use of AI in boardrooms. Langenbucher challenges the view that “black-box” AI should be excluded from board decisions, instead proposing a nuanced framework that includes a judicial review matrix to guide scrutiny. The paper offers a necessary extension of corporate governance theory into the digital age.

The 2025 Intesa Sanpaolo Finance Prize of EUR 5,000 has been awarded to Professors Mike Burkart (LSE, Swedish House of Finance, CEPR and ECGI), Samuel Lee (Santa Clara University, Swedish House of Finance and ECGI) and Paul Voss (HEC Paris) for their paper on: “The Evolution of the Market for Corporate Control”  (ECGI Finance Working Paper 956/2024).

The paper presents a compelling theory of how takeover activism has emerged as a dominant mode of corporate control changes, replacing traditional hostile tender offers. It shows that as more control-oriented investors enter the market, informed shareholders increasingly choose to broker sales to outside bidders rather than initiate takeovers themselves. The model demonstrates how this shift enhances efficiency and overcomes longstanding market frictions. This analysis helps our understanding of the implications of the increased role of takeover activism by private equity in recent years.

This year, in addition to the main prize, the jury in the Finance Series awarded an Honourable Mention to the paper “Why Do Firms Often Not Have a CEO Succession Plan?” (working paper 1023/2024) by Francesco Celentano (HEC Lausanne and Swiss Finance Institute) and Antonio S. Mello (University of Wisconsin-Madison and ECGI). The paper explores a critical, yet often overlooked, dimension of corporate governance: the reluctance of boards to adopt CEO succession plans despite their clear benefits. Through empirical analysis and a dynamic learning model, the authors demonstrate that such plans significantly reduce the costs of CEO turnover and improve the accuracy of internal appointments. However, they also reveal that personal costs and political frictions — not financial ones — often deter adoption. The paper sheds new light on board-level decision-making around leadership continuity.

Referring to the awards, Professor Marco Becht, ECGI Executive Director said: 

“The winning papers explore how governance mechanisms adapt in response to modern institutional, technological, or strategic pressures. Together, they highlight the frictions that hinder effective governance and propose forward-looking frameworks that speak directly to ECGI’s mission of bridging academic insight with real-world impact.”

The prizes will be awarded at the 2025 Global Corporate Governance Colloquium, in London on 14 June 2025.