Economic History Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Kentucky's Debt Relief Attempt, Stephen E. Lile

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Economy And Its Implications To Investors, Elizabeth Misco

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Stock Market Talk, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2004, January 1). Keynes’ own rates of interest citing Panico (1988) [Handwritten notes]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). U.S.: Relative gold price of producer goods (WPI/gold price) [Graph]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Real ratio [Graph with note citing Mankiw]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Definition of bond. (2004, October 17). Printout from WordIQ. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (1997, August 25). Predicting stock prices [Handwritten notes]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Rates of return: Stock market & corporate business [Graphs]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Real profits [Graph]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, …

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Social Security Reform: An Expository Report, Nathan J. Voss

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

New Stock Market Paper, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Godley, W., & Levy, J. (2003, March). Short-term interest rates [Page from report with chart]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Sarich, J., & Hecht, J. (2003, September). Classical competition and international equity returns: The financial-profitability nexus [Paper for the Economics for the Future Conference, with handwritten annotations by Shaikh]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2003, October 13). Comments on the Sarich and Hecht paper [Handwritten notes]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2003, February). Quarterly (Ravi): Interpolating data [Handwritten notes]. Unpublished manuscript.

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2003, February 20). Real stock return [Two charts]. Unpublished manuscript.

• NIPA tables. (n.d.). Unpublished manuscript. …

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Money, Credit, And Banking In Colonial And Postcolonial West Africa, Akanmu G. Adebayo

Faculty Articles

Scholarship in African economic history has been dominated by a wave of revisionism lately. The degree of African indebtedness, the imperatives of loan repayment, and the long-term implications of ongoing political and economic changes, all make such a revision exigent indeed. Focusing on the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, this paper produces new evidence to reinterpret and redefine African precolonial financial institutions. The paper has two main parts. Part 1 focuses on the introduction of cowrie currency into Yorubaland and its impact on social stratification. Part 2 examines ajo, the savings institution, esusu, the rotating savings and credit associations (roscas), and …

Dynamic Interactions Among Stock Prices, Interest Rates, Real Activity And Money In Malaysia, Chin Sieng Chong

Student Works (2000-2009)

This study investigates the causal relations and dynamic interactions among stock prices, real interest rate, real money balances and real activity in Malaysia using monthly data from January 1987 to December 2001. This full sample period is also divided into two sub-periods for analysis. The first sub-period covers January 1987 to August 1998 while the second sub-period covers September 1998 to December 2001. The conventional unit root tests suggest that all variables are integrated of order one. This finding is further supported by the results of the unit root test which allows for a structural break in the series. All …

Bank Consolidation As A Strategic Response To The Banking Crisis : An Analysis Of The Choice Of Anchor Banks, Talagavathi R. Karapayah

Student Works (2000-2009)

The financial crisis of 1997 and the result1ng effects showed the weaknesses and vulnerability of the Malaysian banking system. In addition, impending globalization and liberalization of the financial sector has increased the urgency to strengthen the banking sector. Strengthening of the banking sector was to be realized by the merger of banking institutions under 10 anchor banks. The decision to consolidate the banking industry under 10 anchor banks was a necessary decision but the reasons for the choice of these 10 banks were not explained. This paper looked at some of the possible reasons for the selection of the particular …

A Political Model Of Monetary Policy With Application To The Real Fed Funds Rate, Tony Caporale, Kevin B. Grier

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We construct an empirical model of U.S. monetary policy assuming that the Federal Reserve is an ordinary federal bureaucracy. We use the real Federal Funds rate as our policy measure and show the existence of significant executive, legislative, and bureaucratic influence on the real rate of interest from 1961 to 1996. We find that presidential party is an adequate statistical measure of executive influence and that the voting scores of the Senate Banking Committee leadership best represent legislative influence. We argue that political changes cause systematic and predictable changes in monetary policy.

The Fischer Black Hypothesis: Some Time-Series Evidence, Tony Caporale, Barbara Mckiernan

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We estimate an ARCH-M model to analyze the relationship between the conditional standard deviation of real gross national product (GNP) and its growth rate for the period 1871-1993. We find that variability significantly increases output growth rates. In addition, impulse response functions show that the effect of variability on growth rates is dynamic. These results provide evidence in favor of Black's (1987) business cycle hypothesis.

Tobin, James, Tony Caporale

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

James Tobin was born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1918. He received his bachelor's degree in 1939 and his master's degree in 1940, both from Harvard. Following naval service during the years 1942-6, he returned to his graduate studies and received his PhD from Harvard in 1947. In 1950, he joined the economics department at Yale University, and he has largely remained at Yale and has been identified with this institution throughout his career. He twice directed the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, first from 1955 to 1961, and then from 1964 to 1965. He also served for two years, …

The Federal Reserve System And Its Relation To Monetary Conditions In The United States: A Study Of The Banking System Of The United States, Gertrude F. Goldberg

Business and Economics Honors Papers

This 38 page thesis examines the history of the banking system in the United States and its problems.