Innovation and the Organizational Contract: Lessons from Income Trusts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article investigates why North American businesses typically do not adopt the trust form, other than as a financing vehicle. It examines an episode in Canada in which the trust form became very popular amongst publicly traded businesses. Until 2006, there were significant tax advantages associated with adopting an "income trust" structure. Regardless of the tax motivations for the form, the income trust offered businesses greater flexibility in choosing their governance rules than that offered by the corporate form. Income trusts often took advantage of this flexibility, deviating from mandatory corporate law rules on a number of dimensions. This Article finds that there were positive market reactions to innovations in governance by income trusts. However, once the law changed to remove the tax advantages of income trusts, the form all but ceased to be adopted — despite relatively low costs of adoption. On balance, this Article suggests that innovative trust structures are not especially valuable from a pure governance perspective, though governance innovations may be valuable if combined with tax advantages.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
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".