About
Kenneth is an Assistant Professor at the NUS Faculty of Law. He graduated from NUS (2014) with an LL.B. (First Class Honours) and a B.Soc.Sci. (Economics) (First Class Honours); the London School of Economics (2018, M.Sc. Economics); and Yale Law School (2019, LL.M.; 2024, J.S.D.). In 2022 he was a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Corporate Governance. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of Law and Economics, especially Corporate Law, Mergers and Acquisitions, Securities Regulation, and Competition Law. His awards include the Ministry of Trade and Industry (Economist Service) Prize for Best Thesis in Economics (NUS), the Best Academic Paper on ESG (Junior Category) at the ECGI–Berkeley Forum on Corporate Governance, and the Best Paper Award for Junior Scholars at the Asian Law and Economics Association Annual Conference. His work has been published (or is forthcoming) in journals including the Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, International Review of Law and Economics, and European Business Organization Law Review.
Featured Research
Expanding Shareholder Voice: The Impact of SEC Guidance on Environmental and Social Proposals
With Roberto Tallarita | Journal of Law and Economics (forthcoming)
After a dramatic increase over the past decade, shareholder support for environmental and social (E&S) proposals seems to have waned. In this Article, we examine whether this recent decline is linked to a 2021 shift in the SEC’s policy, which expanded the ability of shareholders to influence E&S corporate decisions. We suggest that this regulatory shift has led to an increase in “prescriptive” E&S proposals, which typically call for more aggressive but costlier E&S policies by companies. Using a combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to identify prescriptive proposals, we find that these proposals generally receive less shareholder support and seem to be driving a substantial part of the decline in support for E&S proposals.
Award: Best Academic Paper on ESG (Junior Category) at the ECGI–Berkeley Forum on Corporate Governance
The Price of Delaware Corporate Law Reform
With Roberto Tallarita | Under Review
In 2025, Delaware legislators proposed and approved a major overhaul of the state’s corporate law code (SB 21). The new statute contains more permissive rules for transactions involving conflicted controlling shareholders and places new constraints on shareholder-plaintiffs with the intent to curb fiduciary litigation. We conduct a series of event studies to measure the stock market’s response to SB 21. Our findings are consistent with the critics’ view that corporate law reform has reduced the shareholder value of Delaware companies. In particular, the market reaction suggests that Delaware’s choice to relax the rules on controller conflicts harmed investors in controlled companies and dual-class companies, where minority shareholders are more vulnerable.
Visual Saliency and Investment Decisions
With Luca Enriques, Alfredo Desiato, Yoon-Ho Alex Lee, and Alessandro Romano | Under Review
Despite regulatory efforts to improve fee transparency, investors persistently underweight fees and overweight past performance. This study employs webcam-based eye-tracking technology in a large-scale online experiment to investigate how manipulating the visual saliency of fees shapes investment decisions. The findings show that increasing fee saliency reduces time-to-first-fixation on past performance graphs by 47-75% and significantly increases dwell time on fees by 3-5.8%. These shifts in visual attention are associated with an 11.2% greater allocation to lower-fee funds in treatment groups compared to the control, with effects magnified for fund pairs exhibiting larger fee differentials.