Most investors have a single goal: to earn the highest financial return. These socially-neutral investors maximize their risk-adjusted returns and would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced social benefits. An increasing number of socially-motivated investors...

The focus of comparative corporate governance scholarship is shifting from takeovers to controlling shareholders in recognition of the fact that public corporations everywhere but in the U.S. and U.K. are characterized by a shareholder with effective voting control. Debate is now turning to the...

The rough coincidence of the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s Sunday New York times Magazine article – “the Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profit” – and a movement advocating that corporations should have a broader purpose than maximizing shareholder value...

The Nordic Region is remarkable in many ways and has been the subject of increasing interest over the past years. The five countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are culturally closely aligned and combine a well-functioning business sector and high GDP with an expansive...

The post-war experience of developing countries leads to two depressing conclusions: only a small number of countries have successfully developed; and development theory has not produced development. In this article we examine one critical fact that might provide insights into the development...

Business corporations in the nineteenth century often imposed limits on the voting rights of large shareholders. Economic historians have generally interpreted these voting restrictions as a contractual mechanism designed to protect small shareholders in a legal environment that afforded...

The nineteenth century saw the standardization and rapid spread of the modern business corporation around the world. Yet those early corporations differed from their contemporary counterparts in important ways. Most obviously, they commonly deviated from the one-share-one-vote rule that is...