Corporate Governance
Is There Really a Conflict Between Better Corporate Governance and More Competitive Product Markets?
A new study shows that the supposed tradeoff between better corporate governance and more competitive product markets may not exist. More commonly-owned firms have...
How Companies Spin Off Environmental Liabilities to Avoid Legal Obligations
Environmental externalities are vexing for corporate decision makers, but some companies have figured out a way to deal with them: a spinoff. A recent...
Corporate Responsibility and The Two Minds of Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman had two inconsistent minds: That of an economist and an ideologue. The view that maximizing profits without constraint is a manager’s only...
We Need More Research on Corporate Corruption
The last decade has seen a continuous drumbeat of revelations of corporate corruption and the current economic crisis is sure to reveal many more....
The Social Voice of CEOs
A new working paper examines the phenomenon of CEO activism and finds that while statements by activist CEOs are more likely to have a...
The Purpose of Business is to Solve Problems of Society, Not to Cause Them
Claims that a stakeholder-focused system of corporate governance cannot succeed in the US are perverse because they take as given that corporations in the...
Bringing Ethics Back to Friedman’s Call to Purpose for the Next 50 Years
Fifty years ago, Friedman compellingly presented his argument for shareholder primacy. But as currently implemented, shareholder primacy threatens the unifying purposes that drove people...
A Challenge for Stakeholder Capitalism: Solving the Paradoxes of Voting
If corporations are to maximize shareholder welfare, managers need to discover what shareholders value; political theory shows how difficult this can be.
Editor’s note: To...
Corporations Are Governance Mechanisms, Not Shareholder Toys
Milton Friedman’s shareholder credo is simple and catchy but has shaky foundations. Corporate directors and officers are not agents of shareholders and have no...
Missing in Today’s Shareholder Value Maximization Credo: The Shareholders
Today’s corporate world is very different from the one Milton Friedman wrote in. In a world where the question of whether managers should only...
