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Business Organizations Law

Corporations

Columbia Law School

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

The Corporate Governance Machine, Dorothy S. Lund, Elizabeth Pollman Jan 2021

The Corporate Governance Machine, Dorothy S. Lund, Elizabeth Pollman

Faculty Scholarship

The conventional view of corporate governance is that it is a neutral set of processes and practices that govern how a company is managed. We demonstrate that this view is profoundly mistaken: For public companies in the United States, corporate governance has become a “system” composed of an array of institutional players, with a powerful shareholderist orientation. Our original account of this “corporate governance machine” generates insights about the past, present, and future of corporate governance. As for the past, we show how the concept of corporate governance developed alongside the shareholder primacy movement. This relationship is reflected in the …


Locating Innovation: The Endogeneity Of Technology, Organizational Structure, And Financial Contracting, Ronald J. Gilson Jan 2010

Locating Innovation: The Endogeneity Of Technology, Organizational Structure, And Financial Contracting, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

There is much we do not understand about the "location" of innovation: the confluence, for a particular innovation, of the technology associated with the innovation; the innovating firm's size and organizational structure; and the financial contracting that supports the innovation. This Essay suggests that these three indicia are determined simultaneously and discusses the interaction among them through four examples of innovative activity whose location is characterized by tradeoffs between pursuing the activity in an established company, in a smaller, earlier-stage company, or some combination of the two. It first considers the dilemma faced by an established company in deciding whether …


Innovation In Corporate Law, Katharina Pistor, Yoram Keinan, Jan Kleinheisterkamp, Mark D. West Jan 2003

Innovation In Corporate Law, Katharina Pistor, Yoram Keinan, Jan Kleinheisterkamp, Mark D. West

Faculty Scholarship

In most countries large business enterprises today are organized as corporations. The corporation with its key attributes of independent personality, limited liability and free tradeability of shares has played a key role in most developed market economies since the 19th century and has made major inroads in emerging markets. We suggest that the resilience of the corporate form is a function of the adaptability of the legal framework to a changing environment. We analyze a country's capacity to innovate using the rate of statutory legal change, the flexibility of corporate law, and institutional change as indicators. Our findings suggest that …