For the past two decades, legal and economic scholarship has tended to assume that the central economic problem addressed by corporation law is getting managers and directors to act as faithful agents for shareholders. There are other important economic problems faced by business firms, however....

Although there is controversy among economists about whether the U.S. economy is really functioning in a new way in the last decade, there is widespread agreement on one feature of the so-called "New Economy": Physical assets, such as land, natural resources, office space, factories, and...

In this article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe may increasingly be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce, especially in developing countries where rule...

At the close of the twentieth century, U.S. corporate scholarship was dominated by a principal-agent paradigm that assumed that shareholders were the principals or sole residual claimants in public corporations, and also assumed that corporate directors were the shareholders' agents. This...

In the heated debate of the last fifteen years over which of the world's many different corporate governance systems were best, the shareholder primacy advocates thought they had won at the turn of the century. Now, in 2002, the helium has come out of the formerly high-flying technology and...

Corporations can be understood as solutions to team production problems, rather than as property. Incorporation involves creation of a new legal entity in which control rights are separated from residual claim rights. The corporation itself, not the shareholders nor any other corporate...

Comprising essays specially commissioned for the volume, leading scholars who have shaped the field of corporate law and governance explore and critique developments in this vibrant and expanding area and offer possible directions for future research.