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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Law
On The Proper Motives Of Corporate Directors (Or, Why You Don't Want To Invite Homo Economicus To Join Your Board), Lynn A. Stout
On The Proper Motives Of Corporate Directors (Or, Why You Don't Want To Invite Homo Economicus To Join Your Board), Lynn A. Stout
Lynn A. Stout
One of the most important questions in corporate governance is how directors of public corporations can be motivated to serve the interests of the firm. Directors frequently hold only small stakes in the companies they manage. Moreover, a variety of legal rules and contractual arrangements insulate them from liability for business failures. Why then should we expect them to do a good job? Conventional corporate scholarship has great difficulty wrestling with this question, in large part because conventional scholarship usually adopts the economist's assumption that directors are rational actors motivated purely by self-interest. This homo economicus model of behavior may …
Specific Investment: Explaining Anomalies In Corporate Law, Margaret M. Blair, Lynn A. Stout
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 …
On The Rise Of Shareholder Primacy, Signs Of Its Fall, And The Return Of Managerialism (In The Closet), Lynn Stout
On The Rise Of Shareholder Primacy, Signs Of Its Fall, And The Return Of Managerialism (In The Closet), Lynn Stout
Lynn A. Stout
In their 1932 opus "The Modern Corporation and Public Property," Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means famously documented the evolution of a new economic entity—the public corporation. What made the public corporation “public,” of course, was that it had thousands or even hundreds of thousands of shareholders, none of whom owned more than a small fraction of outstanding shares. As a result, the public firm’s shareholders had little individual incentive to pay close attention to what was going on inside the firm, or even to vote. Dispersed shareholders were rationally apathetic. If they voted at all, they usually voted to approve …
Share Price As A Poor Criterion For Good Corporate Law, Lynn A. Stout
Share Price As A Poor Criterion For Good Corporate Law, Lynn A. Stout
Lynn A. Stout
Academics, reformers, and business leaders all yearn for a single, objective, easy-to-read measure of corporate performance that can be used to judge the quality of public corporation law and practice. This collective desire is so powerful that it has led many commentators to grab onto the first marginally plausible candidate: share price. Contemporary economic and corporate theory, as well as recent business history, nevertheless warn us against unthinking acceptance of share price as a measure of corporate performance. This Essay offers a brief reminder of some of the many reasons why stock prices often fail to reflect true corporate performance, …
The Investor Confidence Game, Lynn A. Stout
The Investor Confidence Game, Lynn A. Stout
Lynn A. Stout
Academic discussions of securities policy often assume that investors are hyperrational and distrustful actors who do not need the protections of the securities laws to avoid being defrauded. The time has come to recognize the limitations of this assumption and to consider as well the possibility and implications of investor trust. Experienced policymakers and businesspeople (and certainly experienced con artists) have long known that trust is a potent force in explaining and manipulating investor behavior. They are right. They are right to believe that investor confidence-meaning investor trust-is important to the market. They are right to think that trust has …
Some Thoughts On Poverty And Failure In The Market For Children's Human Capital, Lynn A. Stout
Some Thoughts On Poverty And Failure In The Market For Children's Human Capital, Lynn A. Stout
Lynn A. Stout
No abstract provided.