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Business Organizations Law

Agency costs

Selected Works

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Specific Investment: Explaining Anomalies In Corporate Law, Margaret M. Blair, Lynn A. Stout Feb 2015

Specific Investment: Explaining Anomalies In Corporate Law, Margaret M. Blair, Lynn A. Stout

Lynn A. Stout

This Article has two goals: to praise Professor Robert Clark as a remarkable corporate scholar, and to explore how his work has helped to advance our understanding of corporations and corporate law. Clark wrote his classic treatise at a time when corporate scholarship was dominated by a principal-agent paradigm that viewed shareholders as the principals or sole residual claimants in public corporations and treated directors as shareholders' agents. This view naturally led contemporary scholars to believe that the chief economic problem of interest in corporate law was the "agency cost" problem of getting corporate directors to do what shareholders wanted …


Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, And Complete Capital Markets, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles K. Whitehead Dec 2007

Deconstructing Equity: Public Ownership, Agency Costs, And Complete Capital Markets, Ronald J. Gilson, Charles K. Whitehead

Charles K Whitehead

The traditional law and finance focus on agency costs presumes that the premise that diversified public shareholders are the cheapest risk bearers is immutable. In this Essay, we raise the possibility that changes in the capital markets have called this premise into question, drawn into sharp relief by the recent private equity wave in which the size and range of public companies being taken private expanded significantly. In brief, we argue that private owners, in increasingly complete markets, can transfer risk in discrete slices to counterparties who, in turn, can manage or otherwise diversify away those risks they choose to …