Corporations

To Make a Difference, Businesses Must Have a Stake in Social Missions

Despite their promises to change the world for the better and remedy social ills, the truth is that corporations are rarely designed...

There Is a Direct Line from Milton Friedman to Donald Trump’s Assault on Democracy

Milton Friedman believed that corporations have a social responsibility to play within the rules of the game. But corporations aren’t just players...

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...

Economics, Law and Finance Professors from Major Universities Write to Congress : “Bail Out People Before Large Corporations”

"Bailouts allow investors to keep all the profits in good times without bearing the losses in bad times. Instead, bailouts impose losses on taxpayers, including those...

The Problem With Unicorns: Why Investors Stopped WeWork From Going Public

More and more startups are valued at over $1 billion, even if they have dysfunctional corporate structures and hazardous business models. For tech companies,...

The Business Roundtable CEOs’ Statement: Same Old, Same Old

Despite the media hype about corporate CEOs having abandoned their shareholder value maximization credo, the recent statement from the Business Roundtable contains nothing new...

How Offshoring by Multinational Corporations Contributed to the Decline of US Manufacturing

The offshoring activities of multinational firms explain about one-third of the aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment, according to a new study.  Between 1990 and...

Is Lionizing CEOs Dangerous for Society?

In an interview with ProMarket, Open University's Peter Bloom talks about his provocative new book CEO Society and why he believes celebrating corporate CEOs...

The Foundation of Corporate Personhood: A Look at the Charles River Bridge Case of 1837

Some 130 years before Friedman could begin arguing that a corporation’s sole responsibility was to make a profit for its shareholders, Boston’s Charles River...

LATEST NEWS

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.