This article examines the economic underpinnings of the concept of corporate purpose, which has gained increasing attention from business academics, practitioners and policymakers. It argues that there are fundamental reasons...
We develop a theory of how the intersection of business goals and the pursuit of ?higher purpose?? something that produces a non-pecuniary social benefit valued by the principal and the agent ? affects economic outcomes. Two types of...
The hot topic in corporate governance is the debate over corporate purpose and, in particular, whether corporations should shift their purpose from the pursuit of shareholder wealth to pursuing a broader conception of stakeholder or...
A high profile public debate is taking place over one of the oldest questions in corporate law, namely, “For whom is the corporation managed?” In addition to legal academics and lawyers, high profile business leaders and business...
This paper reports the findings of a recent survey of 1019 individuals to learn about their commitment to and perceived value from personal and organizational higher purpose, and examines the implications of the findings for corporate...
Business history and theory reflect a tension between public and private conceptions of the corporation. This tension and conceptual ambiguity lay close to the surface of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, in which Berle and...
How does organizational higher purpose affect employee behavior and firm output? We develop an optimal-contracting model which shows that pursuing organizational higher purpose dissipates agency frictions, lowers wage costs and...
This Chapter seeks to make three modest contributions by offering views of the corporate purpose cathedral that bear on the role of law in it. These views underscore the difference and the tension between an individual perspective and a...
This chapter introduces the Research Handbook on Comparative Corporate Governance and surveys several of the central themes addressed in the book. Most corporate governance research deals with the interaction between board...
The second seminar of the ECGI Spotlight Series presented a paper by Prof. Ed Rock (NYU School of Law and ECGI), “For...Read more
ECGI and IESE Business School hosted a conference on "Can Purpose Deliver Better Corporate Governance?" on October 28-30, 2020 online.
Marco Becht (Solvay Brussels School for Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles and ECGI), Jordi Canals (IESE) and Franz Heukamp (IESE) introduced the conference.