The state-competition literature through Phase 5 had treated Delaware and the rest of the country as a single binary contrast. Beginning in 2012, Michal Barzuza re-cast the picture. In Market Segmentation: The Rise of Nevada as a Liability-Free Jurisdiction, published in the Virginia Law Review, Barzuza identified Nevada as a deliberate market segment — a state that had positioned its corporate code to attract a specific kind of firm (small, controlled, liability-conscious) by offering exceptionally weak fiduciary remedies and aggressive director-liability protections.18 The Barzuza framing changed the analytic structure of the field. The question was no longer whether Delaware competed with the other forty-nine states; it was whether Delaware and Nevada were competing for different segments of the demand for corporate-law product.
Ofer Eldar's 2018 paper in the Journal of Law and Economics, Can Lax Corporate Law Increase Shareholder Value? Evidence from Nevada, supplied the first modern multi-state event study built on the segmentation framing.19 Eldar measured stock-market reactions to Nevada reincorporations between 1996 and 2013 and found small but positive abnormal returns for a particular subset of firms — closely held, liability-conscious, and small — consistent with Barzuza's segmentation thesis. Eldar's design is the closest pre-Delaware-Exit analogue to the multi-state event-study design used on this site, and the methodology lineage is direct.