shareholder value

In new research, Michele Fioretti, Victor Saint-Jean, and Simon Smith show that NGO activism follows a clear economic logic: when NGOs lack visibility, stakeholders do not view them as credible, forcing them to rely on high-profile campaigns during annual shareholder meetings. However, these actions generate attention but rarely influence decisions. As NGOs gain recognition, they can campaign earlier, when votes are still open, and meaningfully sway shareholders and change corporate behavior.

Todd Gormley and Manish Jha find that institutional investors holding bonds may experience greater investor attention and more active shareholding voting on their equity positions.

Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales have proposed a revision to the dominant model of the objective of the firm, most famously defended by Milton...

In an excerpt from his new book, Ages of American Capitalism, economic historian Jonathan Levy explains how "financiers blew up the postwar industrial corporation...

A new Stigler Center working paper finds that the likelihood of someone signing an online petition or contacting their US senators to support corporate...

Friedman was more right than his detractors claim and more wrong than his supporters would like us to believe. However, after 50 years of...

Fifty years ago, Friedman compellingly presented his argument for shareholder primacy. But as currently implemented, shareholder primacy threatens the unifying purposes that drove people...

Milton Friedman predicated his shareholder value maximization credo on the strong implicit and explicit assumptions that the rules of society protect stakeholders other than...

Being socially responsible can, and frequently does, make good business sense. There are plenty of opportunities for companies to do well by doing good. Editor’s...

If corporations are to maximize shareholder welfare, managers need to discover what shareholders value; political theory shows how difficult this can be. Editor’s note: To...