Law, Economics, and Beyond: A Case for Retheorizing the Business Corporation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay presents a critical analysis of the economic theory of corporations and its idioms, such as “nexus of contracts”, “agency costs”, and “shareholder value”. It calls for the development of a richer and more inclusive theory of business corporations that draws on the experience of the last three decades and better addresses the needs of the post-Enron, post-AIG world. The author identifies the following shortcomings of the economic theory of corporations. First, the contractarian interpretation overlooks the role of law and public policy in corporations. Second, using share prices as the yardstick of corporate performance and encouraging practices such as the buyback of shares have serious implications for the competitiveness and sustainability of corporations. Third, there is inadequate attention to the characteristic and normative distinctions between debt and equity. And fourth, hostile takeovers are treated as virtually the only solution to entrenched managements. The problem of managerial power must be reviewed in the light of evidence regarding managerial power and the efficacy of boards. Equally, there is a case for developing a more deliberated, fair, and equitable policy on executive pay.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.100 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.045 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".