Statistics released by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) indicate that Professor Lucian Bebchuk continued in 2011 to lead SSRN ranks as he has done in each of the preceding four years. As of December 2011, Bebchuk ranked first among all law school professors (in all fields) in terms of both the number of citations to his work and the number of downloads of his work on SSRN. (SSRN’s rankings in terms of citations are available here and SSRN’s rankings in terms of downloads are available here.) Bebchuk’s papers (available on his SSRN page here) have attracted a total of more than 3,500 citations and about 170,000 downloads.

Bebchuk’s top ten papers in terms of citations are as follows:

• What Matters in Corporate Governance?  (with Alma Cohen and Allen Ferrell) (cited 385 times)
• Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation (with Jesse Fried) (268 citations)
• Executive Compensation as an Agency Problem (with Jesse Fried) (250 citations)
• Managerial Power and Rent Extraction in the Design of Executive Compensation (with Jesse Fried and David Walker) (205 citations)
• Stock Pyramids, Cross-Ownership, and Dual Class Equity: The Creation and Agency Costs of Separating Control from Cash Flow Rights (with Reinier Kraakman and George Triantis) (171 citations)
• A Theory of Path Dependence in Corporate Ownership and Governance (with Mark Roe) (156 citations)
• A Rent-Protection Theory of Corporate Ownership and Control (145 citations)
• The Costs of Entrenched Boards (with Alma Cohen) (143 citations)
• The Case for Increasing Shareholder Power (89 citations)
• The Powerful Antitakeover Force of Staggered Boards: Theory, Evidence, and Policy (with John Coates and Guhan Subramanian) (81 citations)

SSRN is the leading electronic service for social science research, and its electronic library contains (as of December 2011) over 307,000 full-text documents by more than 176,000 authors.