Economics Commons^™

Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

On the weekend of November 6–8, 2009, scholars from around the world gathered in Seattle for a symposium—In Berle’s Footsteps—celebrating the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. As founding director of the Berle Center, I described our undertaking: “It is with a profound sense of obligation to the legacy that has been entrusted to my care, that I announce the launching of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. It is a privilege to follow in Berle’s footsteps.”

Opening Remarks, Chancellor William B. Chandler Iii

Seattle University Law Review

Law is, in many ways, a backwards-looking field. We litigate over facts that have already occurred, challenge deals that have already been signed, and apply rules of decision based on previously-established precedent or statutes already enacted. To the extent that this Center and the symposium reflect on Berle’s work, they too are an exercise in looking back. Indeed, some might say the establishment of a Center named in Berle’s honor is a monument to the past.

Revisiting Berle And Rethinking The Corporate Structure, Kelli A. Alces

Seattle University Law Review

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means painted what remains a defining portrait of corporate law. The separation of ownership and control they described and the agency costs it causes are still a central concern of the law of corporate governance. For that reason, Berle’s work is relevant nearly eighty years after its publication. Seemingly forgotten, however, is that Berle’s enduring description of the corporate structure was published before most of today’s corporate law was in place. His work preceded the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and even preceded the dominance of Delaware common law in …

Power Without Property, Still: Unger, Berle, And The Derivatives Revolution, Cristie Ford, Carol Liao

Seattle University Law Review

We are in a time when the notion of property is in flux. The derivatives revolution has shattered the “atom of property” well beyond what was originally imagined in 1932 by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means. This disaggregation has had fascinating, and often adverse, effects on corporate law and securities regulation. Moreover, the phenomenon has had the unexpected effect of permitting some parties that already possess considerable social, economic, and political power to accumulate even more.

The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel

Seattle University Law Review

In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means wrote about the separation of ownership from control in corporations. They noted that the interests of the controlling directors and managers can diverge from those of the shareholder owners of the firm. . . . There are those who consider such a decoupling beneficial. Others express the same concern that Berle and Means have expressed. And depending on what one focuses on in viewing the pluses and minuses of these separations, one could reach different conclusions. I reach a number of conclusions. First, the separation of …

Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill

Seattle University Law Review

Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article dis- cusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises have prompted a reevaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder—and the role of the shareholder in the modern …

Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

In the first and last four chapters (“the Five Chapters”) of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf Berle, Jr. describes in sweeping terms a fundamental transformation of the American economy. . . . Writing more than ten years before Berle, another seminal scholar, Frank Knight . . . developed a theory of the entrepreneur as part of his larger effort to more carefully explain the theoretical underpinnings of a free-market economy. . . . Given Knight’s prominence and the fact that Knight apparently reached dramatically different conclusions than did Berle concerning the consequences flowing from separation of ownership …

The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Article briefly examines the concept of “corporate governance” and argues for dating the concept’s origins to the debates of the 1920s. Part II then moves on to examine early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control. After surveying the historical developments that produced the recognizably modern corporate economy around the turn of the century, it examines early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control, focusing on three major thinkers, Louis D. Brandeis, Walter Lippmann, and Thorstein Veblen. It argues that, while each of these authors examined the separation …

Club Goods And Group Identity: Evidence From Islamic Resurgence During The Indonesian Financial Crisis, Daniel L. Chen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper tests a model in which group identity in the form of religious intensity functions as ex post insurance. I exploit relative price shocks induced by the Indonesian financial crisis to demonstrate a causal relationship between economic distress and religious intensity (Koran study and Islamic school attendance) that is weaker for other forms of group identity. Consistent with ex post insurance, credit availability reduces the effect of economic distress on religious intensity, religious intensity alleviates credit constraints, and religious institutions smooth consumption shocks across households and within households, particularly for those who were less religious before the crisis.

Microfinance And Women’S Empowerment In Honduras, Katherine Sugg

Sociology Honors Papers

This thesis examines the possibilities for women’s empowerment through microfinance. It utilizes the results of a survey conducted in 2009 with clients of the microfinance organization FINCA Honduras. The analysis of these survey results yields important conclusions on FINCA Honduras’ ability to empower Honduran women economically, psychologically, and socio-culturally. The original hypothesis of this study stated that FINCA Honduras’ financial services would help the female client to improve her standard of living, her psychological well-being, and her gender relationships in the home. FINCA Honduras has partially succeeded in empowering its female clients in these ways, but currently lacks the specific …

Monitoring To Reduce Agency Costs: Examining The Behavior Of Independent And Non-Independent Boards, Anita Anand, Frank Milne, Lynnette Purda

Seattle University Law Review

Berle and Means’s analysis of the corporation—in particular, their view that those in control are not the owners of the corporation—raises questions about actions that corporations take to counter concerns regarding management’s influence. What mechanisms, if any, do corporations implement to balance the distribution of power in the corporation? To address this question, we analyze boards of directors’ propensity to voluntarily adopt recommended corporate governance practices. Because board independence is one way to enhance shareholders’ ability to monitor management, we probe whether firms with independent boards of directors (which we define as boards with either an independent chair or a …

Citizenship In The Humanities And Social Sciences: A Selective Bibliography, 2000-2009, Wayne State University School Of Library And Information Science, Winter 2010 Lis 7160, James E. Van Loon, H.G.B. Anghelescu

School of Information Sciences Faculty Research Publications

Citizenship in the Humanities and Social Sciences is a selective bibliography consisting of citations to works published during the years 2000-2009 on citizenship-related topics in the humanities and social sciences. Primarily consisting of books/chapters and scholarly journal articles, the bibliography also includes other materials (case studies, reports, dissertations, and working papers) for which scholarship, authority and relevance have been established. Most cited works are published in the English language, although articles published in other languages using a Latin alphabet are also included. Citations were retrieved during January-March 2010 from a variety of aggregated databases accessed through the Wayne State University …

Site Value Tax, Tom Dunne

Articles

Tom Dunne discusses some of the issues surrounding property taxation in Ireland

Multiethnic Labor Markets And Socioeconomic Mobility : A Career Trajectory Perspective, Jeremy F. Pais

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the United States, high rates of immigration have once again raised important questions concerning the effect of ethnic diversity on patterns of socioeconomic mobility and levels of inequality between racial and ethnic groups. However, despite the potential effect of immigration and ethnic diversity on racial and ethnic stratification within multiethnic societies, research has yet to provide an examination of the impact of these factors on patterns of social mobility over the life course. While prior research focuses extensively on metropolitan area characteristics related to contemporaneous race and ethnic labor market disparities, the primary contribution of this research is to …

Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

The Modern Corporation & Private Property is a paradigm-shifting analysis of the modern corporation. The book is perhaps best known for the insights of Berle and Means about the separation of ownership from control and the consequences of that separation for the allocation of power within the corporation. The Berle and Means story focuses on the shareholder as the owner of the corporation. Berle and Means saw the mechanism of centralized management—in which the shareholder retains the economic interest but not the control rights associated with ownership—as threatening the conception of shareholder interests in terms of property rights. In particular, …

The Modern Corporation As Social Construction, Mark S. Mizruchi, Daniel Hirschman

Seattle University Law Review

Classic works, Mark Mizruchi and Lisa Fein argued, share a particular fate. Authors often cite classic works without reading them—or without reading them carefully. . . . Yet perhaps no single work fits the above description better than one of the most important books on the large corporation ever published: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. One can speculate that few works in the social sciences have been as often cited and as little read. As a consequence, we would expect The Modern Corporation to be a good candidate for either selective interpretation or …

Do Ugly Criminals Receive Harsher Sentences? An Analysis Of Lookism In The Criminal Justice System, Kelly Beck

Business and Economics Honors Papers

For many years, researchers have attempted to find a link between beauty and labor market outcomes. Although many important findings have been noted in these studies, the beauty analysis utilized was a subjective measurement. This subjective method, while important, may have external factors creating bias in the rating itself. In this study, the impact of beauty is applied to criminals and their sentences. Using a computer based symmetry measurement tool, an objective beauty measurement will be utilized. This study will seek to uncover whether or not criminals who are less attractive, measured through facial symmetry, receive harsher prison sentences than …

Tribal Gaming And The Political Contributions Strategies Of Native American Tribes In Minnesota, Thomas Sorenson

Political Science Theses and Capstones

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act has made a big impact on tribal-state relations since it was enacted in 1988 by the federal government. Tribes have started to make campaign contributions to state and federal politicians to help try to mold lawmakers to vote for Tribal interests. My research looks at Minnesota tribes and their campaign contributions to House members during the 2005 election, and whether these lawmakers voted for tribal issues during their term. For control variables I also gathered a variety of information related to legislative districts. What my analysis has shown is that the tribes in Minnesota donate …

Frédéric Ozanam ― Beneficent Deserter: Mediating The Chasm Of Income Inequality Through Liberty, Equality, And Fraternity, Craig Mousin

Mission and Ministry Publications

No abstract provided.

Corporate Power In The Public Eye: Reassessing The Implications Of Berle’S Public Consensus Theory, Marc T. Moore, Antoine Rebérioux

Seattle University Law Review

We analyze Berle’s overall corporate governance project in accordance with what we see as its four core sub-themes: (A) the limitations of external market forces as a constraint on managerial decision-making power; (B) the desirability of internal (corporate) over external (market) actors in allocating corporate capital; (C) civil society and the public consensus as a continuous informal check on managerial decision-making power; and (D) shareholder democracy (as opposed to shareholder primacy or shareholder wealth maximization) as a socially instrumental institution. We seek to debunk the popular misconception that Berle’s early work was a defense of the orthodox shareholder primacy paradigm …

Va Healthcare Costs Of A Collaborative Intervention For Chronic Pain In Primary Care, Kathryn C. Dickinson, Rajiv Sharma, Jonathan P. Duckart, Kathryn Corson, Martha S. Gerrity, Steven K. Dobscha

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Chronic pain is costly to individuals and the healthcare system, and is often undertreated. Collaborative care models show promise for improving treatment of patients with chronic pain. The objectives of this article are to report the incremental benefit and incremental health services costs of a collaborative intervention for chronic pain from a veterans affairs (VA) healthcare perspective.

Methods: Data on VA treatment costs incurred by participants were obtained from the VA's Decision Support System for all utilization except certain intervention activities which were tracked in a separate database. Outcome data were from a cluster-randomized trial of a …

Domestication Alone Does Not Lead To Inequality: Intergenerational Wealth Transmission Among Horticulturalists, Michael Gurven, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Paul L. Hooper, Hillard Kaplan, Robert Quinlan, Rebecca Sear, Eric Schniter, Christopher Von Rueden, Samuel Bowles, Tom Hertz, Adrian Bell

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

We present empirical measures of wealth inequality and its intergenerational transmission among four horticulturalist populations. Wealth is construed broadly as embodied somatic and neural capital, including body size, fertility and cultural knowledge, material capital such as land and household wealth, and relational capital in the form of coalitional support and field labor. Wealth inequality is moderate for most forms of wealth, and intergenerational wealth transmission is low for material resources and moderate for embodied and relational wealth. Our analysis suggests that domestication alone does not transform social structure; rather, the presence of scarce, defensible resources may be required before inequality …

The Beginning Of The End? Agricultural Modernization And Dissolution Of The Peasantry In Contemporary China, Qian Forrest Zhang, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

Seattle University Law Review

Readers game enough to work through all three hundred pages of The Modern Corporation and Private Property looking for insights on corporate law today encounter two, apparently contradictory, lines of thought. One line, set out in Books II and III, resonates comfortably with today’s shareholder-centered corporate legal theory. Here the book teaches that even as ownership and control have separated, managers should function as trustees for the shareholders and so should exercise their wide-ranging powers for the shareholders’ benefit. The other line of thought emerges in Books I and IV, where The Modern Corporation encases this shareholder trust model in …

Rethinking The Separation Of Ownership From Management In American History, Kenneth Lipartito, Yumiko Morii

Seattle University Law Review

In <em>The Modern Corporation and Private Property</em>, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means would use AT&T as a prime example of what they saw as a dangerous new trend, the replacement of ownership-based capitalism with giant corporations controlled by a small group of propertyless managers. Indeed, AT&T became Berle and Means’ favorite example. . . . As we shall see, however, the claim that AT&T was a leading example of the separation of ownership from management is incomplete. More importantly, the common interpretation of Berle and Means’ work is mistaken, placing the emphasis incorrectly on the number of shareholders and reading …

Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter

Seattle University Law Review

This essay, published in a symposium on the work of Adolf Berle, approaches the Berle-Dodd debate from the perspective that corporate managers have responsibilities beyond pursuing the interests of shareholders. Stock based executive compensation, designed to align managers’ interests with those of shareholders, has, in the investment banking industry in particular, failed to avert, and may have caused, managers (in this case, bankers) to take excessive risks that in the present financial crisis inflicted great damage on creditors and on society as a whole. We describe here the broad outlines of a proposal that we will discuss in future publications …

Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot

Seattle University Law Review

This paper offers some tentative suggestions as to why Berle’s work has been read and interpreted so selectively in the United Kingdom. I suggest that this must be partly attributable to the historical developments in English company law that entrenched the notion of shareholder ownership claims. Specifically, unincorporated associations’ normative values—that members are owners and there is no distinction between small organizations with no share dispersal and large organizations with wide share dispersal—have a continuing influence on this entrenched notion of shareholder ownership claims. First, I provide an overview of the origins of English company law. Next, I address how …

Obedience, Schooling, And Political Participation, Davin Chor, Filipe R. Campante

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a framework for understanding the joint evolution of cultural norms and human capital investment, and how these affect patterns of political participation. We first present some empirical evidence that cultural attitudes towards obedience systematically influence an individual's propensity to engage in different political activities: obedience discourages more confrontational modes of political activity (such as public demonstrations), while raising participation in non-confrontational civic acts (such as voting). These cultural attitudes further appear to be determined in part by cultural transmission across generations. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a dynamic model in which human capital and obedience are …

Project Animate: Promoting Student Civic Participation Through Latino Voter Mobilization - Ollas Report No. 6, Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado

Latino/Latin American Studies Reports

This project sought to expand voter outreach and mobilization of new registered and Latino voters through a series of activities in the greater Omaha metropolitan area. Following the successful development of a voter mobilization project undertaken in the 2006 election cycle, this project conducted door-to-door canvassing activities utilizing students to distribute nonpartisan voter information and engage in “get out the vote” activities with new Latino registered voters.

Mountain Monitor-3rd Quarter 2009, Brookings Mountain West

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Nationwide, the recession is technically over. Or at least that is the view of most economists. They note that real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) finally expanded in the third quarter of 2009, growing at a 2.8 percent annual rate after four consecutive quarters of contraction. They point to a significant slowing of job losses in November, rising housing prices, and a slight downtick in unemployment as other positive signs. Their conclusion: Economic recovery is at last underway. And yet, the pace of renewal seems tentative and its geography patchy. Most notably, the aggregate national story of recovery and expansion …