Corporate Governance
The Social Responsibility of Business Includes Profits
Profits these days are often seen as a dirty word, but it is wrong to demonize profits. A company’s responsibility is not to sacrifice...
Managers Should Satisfy Only the Ethically Permissible Preferences of Shareholders
Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales have proposed a revision to the dominant model of the objective of the firm, most famously defended by Milton...
Unreliable Accounts: How Regulators Fabricate Conceptual Narratives to Diffuse Criticism
In 2010, as the world was reeling from the global financial crisis, the body that determines generally accepted accounting principles for listed corporations in...
Two Years After the Business Roundtable Statement: Pointing in the Right Direction
The 2019 Business Roundtable statement was a welcome break from the position that the nation’s top corporate CEOs took in 1997, when the BRT pledged...
Two Years Later, Has the Business Roundtable Statement Transformed Capitalism?
Two years after the Business Roundtable redefined its statement of Purpose of a Corporation to include “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders”...
Why Corporate Purpose is Important to the Recovery From the Pandemic
A new initiative seeks to encourage directors, managers, asset owners, and other internal and external stakeholders to collaborate on articulating an actional principle of...
No More “Mystery Meat”: Why We Need Better Corporate Governance Data
Three decades of finance, economics, and legal studies in corporate governance have been built substantially on data sets with nearly unknown provenance. A new...
George Stigler and the Challenge of Democracy
We are all victims of what George Stigler described as “the pervasive use of state support of special groups” and of governance failures everywhere....
How a Wave of Corporate Takeovers Ushered In the Gospel of Shareholder Value
In an excerpt from his new book, Ages of American Capitalism, economic historian Jonathan Levy explains how "financiers blew up the postwar industrial corporation...
What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Jensen and Meckling
Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 article is an academic classic, but heavily criticized by stakeholder capitalists for arguing that corporate structures should be designed to...
