Business Commons^™

Minority Entrepreneurs And Fast Failure, Jesse P. Houchens

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

Minority businesses now make up more than a quarter of all U.S. businesses; yet, due to discriminatory lending practices, cultural aversions to debt, and limited access to capital, these businesses continue to have higher failure rates. At the same time, m inority entrepreneurs are more likely to rely on informal lending and less likely to turn to bankruptcy for relief of debt. Doing so slows down failure for minority entrepreneurs — contra Silicon Valley’s new mantra, “fail fast” — and diminishes the minority entrepreneur’s ability to efficiently reallocate resources towards more productive ventures. In this essay, I distinguish the minority …

Minority Entrepreneurs And Fast Failure, John Taylor Jensen

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

Minority businesses now make up more than a quarter of all U.S. businesses; yet, due to discriminatory lending practices, cultural aversions to debt, and limited access to capital, these businesses continue to have higher failure rates. At the same time, m inority entrepreneurs are more likely to rely on informal lending and less likely to turn to bankruptcy for relief of debt. Doing so slows down failure for minority entrepreneurs — contra Silicon Valley’s new mantra, “fail fast” — and diminishes the minority entrepreneur’s ability to efficiently reallocate resources towards more productive ventures. In this essay, I distinguish the minority …

Family Law And Entrepreneurial Action, D. Gordon Smith

Faculty Scholarship

In "The Contractual Foundation of Family-Business Law," Benjamin Means aspires to lay the groundwork for a law of family businesses. In this brief response essay, I suggest that a workable family-business law along the lines suggested by Means is consistent with an overarching policy in the United States of promoting entrepreneurial action, and I evaluate the proposal against this policy goal, with particular attention to Means’s arguments in favor of “family-business defaults” and his concern over the potentially disruptive role of fiduciary law.

Pricing Disintermediation: Crowdfunding And Online Auction Ipos, A. Christine Hurt

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law & Entrepreneurship: Do Courts Matter?, D. Gordon Smith, Masako Ueda

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, we sketch the outlines of a research agenda exploring links between courts and entrepreneurship. Our conception of law and entrepreneurship encompasses the study of positive law (including constitutions, statutes, and regulations), common law doctrines, and private ordering that relate to the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities by new firms. We briefly survey the economics literatures that relate to law and entrepreneurship, including the law and finance literature launched by the work of Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny (LLSV). Relying on the suggestive work of LLSV and other economists who have labored …

The Viability Of Stimulating Technology-Oriented Entrepreneurial Activity In China, Taiwan, Japan, And South Korea: How Regulations And Culture Encourage The Creation, Development And Exploitation Of Intellectual Property, Matthew L. Goldberg

Brigham Young University International Law & Management Review

No abstract provided.

Team Production In Venture Capital Investing, D. Gordon Smith

Faculty Scholarship

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists engage in team production. Inherent in team production is an incentive problem: team members have an incentive to shirk. The incentive to shirk derives from the inability to monitor team members perfectly and compensate them based on productivity. Economic models of team production teach that solutions to shirking must involve (1) a principal (2) with authority to break the budget by realigning the claims of team members through use of a penalty or a bonding arrangement (3) based only on observations of team output, not on monitoring of individual inputs. This paper analyzes the team production …

Clark Memorandum: Fall 1988, J. Reuben Clark Law Society Of The J. Reuben Clark Law School

The Clark Memorandum

• Rescue Mission (Susan Adams)
• Bridges (Elder Dallin H. Oaks)
• The Study and Practice of the Laws of Men in Light of the Laws of God (Elder James E. Faust)