Organizational law empowers firms to hold assets and enter contracts as entities that are legally distinct from their owners and managers. Legal scholars and economists have commented extensively on one form of this partitioning between firms and owners: namely, the rule of limited liability...

Scholars and practicing lawyers alike consider legal entities to be essential. Who can imagine running a large business without using a business organization, such as a corporation or partnership? This Article challenges conventional wisdom by showing that vast enterprises – with millions of...

The formation of chartered corporations is usually viewed as an agreement between their promoters and the State with payoffs in the form of monopoly rents, property rights, services or taxation. The present article analyzes the formation of the East India Company as a deal between two groups of...

In this paper we investigate a rationale for co-evolution of financial and technological structures in modern firms according to the Comparative Institutional Analysis Approach (CIA). Starting from the 'Transaction Costs Approach' (TCE) to the analysis of the relationship between corporate...

A large Brazilian agribusiness lender introduces a new contracting technology: grain warehouses. Using runner-up warehouse locations as a control group, I find that lenders' access to these warehouses permits a new debt contract, i.e. a barter credit repayable in grain, increases borrowers' debt...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis the EU bank resolution regime went through fundamental changes that seek to preserve financial stability and ensure continuity of critical functions. The same cannot be said of insolvency rules applicable to non-financial enterprises. Unlike bank...

Core institutions of UK corporate governance, in particular those relating to takeovers, board structure and directors' duties, are strongly orientated towards a norm of shareholder primacy. Beyond the core, in particular at the intersection of insolvency and employment law, stakeholder...