Robert Ward Vishny (born c. 1959) is an American economist and is the Myron S. Scholes Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
He was the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Vishny has authored and co-authored dozens of peer-reviewed articles including: The 1997 A Survey of Corporate Governance article broke free from the existing academic literature, which had mainly although not exclusively focused on corporate governance in the U.S., specifically the takeover market.
Instead, this article by Shleifer and Vishny addressed the bigger question of why so many countries around the world had almost non-existent public equity (stock) markets, in comparison to the U.S., U.K., Japan, and a relatively small number of other countries in which selling stock to the general public was comparatively widespread.
They noted that in many countries without active public capital markets, family firms are more important, and bank loans are a major source of external financing.