shareholder value
Bonds Improve Institutional Investors’ Equity Monitoring
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.
Managers Should Satisfy Only the Ethically Permissible Preferences of Shareholders
Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales have proposed a revision to the dominant model of the objective of the firm, most famously defended by Milton...
How a Wave of Corporate Takeovers Ushered In the Gospel of Shareholder Value
In an excerpt from his new book, Ages of American Capitalism, economic historian Jonathan Levy explains how "financiers blew up the postwar industrial corporation...
Public’s Perception of Large Corporations Has Direct Impact on the Public Support of Corporate Bailouts
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’s Legacy: From Doctrine to Theorem
Friedman was more right than his detractors claim and more wrong than his supporters would like us to believe. However, after 50 years of...
Bringing Ethics Back to Friedman’s Call to Purpose for the Next 50 Years
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 and the Need for Justice
Milton Friedman predicated his shareholder value maximization credo on the strong implicit and explicit assumptions that the rules of society protect stakeholders other than...
Shareholder Value and Social Responsibility Are Not At Odds
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...
A Challenge for Stakeholder Capitalism: Solving the Paradoxes of Voting
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...
Corporations Are Governance Mechanisms, Not Shareholder Toys
Milton Friedman’s shareholder credo is simple and catchy but has shaky foundations. Corporate directors and officers are not agents of shareholders and have no...
