Vigorous Race or Leisurely Walk: Reconsidering the Competition over Corporate Charters

Competition for Corporate Charters and the Lesson of Takeover Statutes

The States as a Laboratory: Legal Innovation and State Competition for Corporate Charters

Corporate law is an arena in which the metaphor of the “states as a laboratory” describes actual practice, and, for the most part, this is a laboratory that has worked reasonably well. The goal of this paper is to map out over time the diffusion of corporate law reforms across the states. The lawmaking pattern we observe indicates a dynamic process in which legal innovations originate from seve...

Results or Participation?: Reconsidering Olympism's Approach to Competition

Getting Stuck Between Bottom and Top: State Competition for Corporate Charters in the Presence of Network Effects

For decades, American legal scholars have debated over the implications of allowing corporations to choose in which state they will incorporate, irrespective of where they do business. Until recently the debate has centered almost exclusively on whether the managers who choose where to incorporate have incentive to choose a state whose laws favor managers to the disadvantage of shareholders (th...

Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk.

There is a very large literature on the important role of psychopathy in the criminal justice system. We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications, in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organizations. This has left us with only a few small-sample studies, anecdotes, and speculation. In this study, we had a unique opportunit...