In 2003, the United States enacted a tax reform that reduced, but did not eliminate, individual dividend income taxes. Cutting the dividend tax deprives corporate insiders of a justification for retaining earnings to build unprofitable corporate empires. But not eliminating it entirely preserves...

Trade protection in a declining industry can cause damages beyond those revealed in the usual trade diagram analysis. Using data on the U.S. steel firms, the authors show that trade protection in that industry rewards poor performance, reduces incentives to innovate, and frustrates the normal...

The Common Law, parliamentary democracy, and academia all institutionalize dissent to check undue obedience to authority; and corporate governance reformers advocate the same in boardrooms. Many corporate governance disasters could often be averted if directors asked hard questions, demanded...

Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating the economy's capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting "insufficient" loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty -- people undergoing a...

China's economic boom over the last two decades has taken many analysts by surprise, given the ongoing role of central government planning. Its current growth trajectory suggests that the size of its economy could soon surpass that of the United States. Some argue that continued growth and the...

Why should a firm expand across national frontiers? The costs of operating under different tax systems, coping with different cultural traditions and dealing with multiple bureaucracies are substantial. A new view of international economics called the internalization theory proposes that...