This article outlines the development of English company law in the four centuries before 1900. The main focus is on the evolution of the corporate form and the five key legal characteristics of the corporation - separate legal personality, limited liability, transferable joint stock, delegated...

A popular research design identifies the effects of corporate governance by (changes in) state laws, clustering standard errors by state of incorporation. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, this paper shows that conventional statistical tests based on these standard errors dramatically overreject:...

The rise of large business corporations in the late nineteenth century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's (1897) little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations was an original attempt to...