Corporate Governance
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...
Corporations Are Already Plenty Powerful. Stakeholder Capitalism Could Make Them More So
Encouraging corporations to further step into the role of governments and civil society groups by becoming more "socially focused" risks greater depreciation of our...
For Whom Corporate Leaders Bargained: What the Past Can Teach Us About the Questionable Promise of Implementing Stakeholder Capitalism Today
The debate about stakeholder capitalism should seek to learn from our experience with constituency statutes, which authorized corporate leaders to take into account stakeholder...
Does a CEO Have a Duty to Lobby?
We need not only more disclosure, but also more work in alerting people in general (and students in particular) about the distortive effects of...
What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Milton Friedman
Instead of ridiculing the Friedman doctrine and proclaiming its death, advocates of stakeholder capitalism and responsible investing, like me, can learn a lot from...
The Illusory Promise of “Stakeholderism”: Why Embracing Stakeholder Governance Would Fail Stakeholders
Stakeholderism—granting corporate leaders discretion to give weight to the interest of all stakeholders—should not be expected to deliver its purported benefits to stakeholders. Furthermore,...
Serving Shareholders Doesn’t Mean Putting Profit Above All Else
The time has come for companies, economists, and society to abandon the argument that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits.
Editor’s note:...
Diversifying Corporate Boards — the Best Way Toward a Balanced Shareholder/Stakeholder System of Corporate Governance
Boards can recognize that their shareholders have needs beyond financial wealth maximization. Making corporate boards representative and diverse works better than co-determination or implied...
