In Search of New Foundations

In this paper I argue that corporate finance theory, empirical research, practical applications, and policy recommendations are deeply rooted in an underlying theory of the firm. I also argue that while the existing theories have delivered very important and useful insights, they seem to be quite ineffective in helping us cope with the new type of firms that are emerging. I outline the characteristics that a new theory of the firm should satisfy and how such a theory could change the way we do corporate finance, both theoretically and empirically. Introduction For a relatively young researcher like myself, there is a very strong tendency to look at the history of corporate finance and be overwhelmed by the giants of the recent past. A field that 40 years ago was little more than a collection of cookbook recipes that reflected practitioners’ common sense is today a bona fide discipline, taught not only to future practitioners but also to doctoral students, both in business schools and in economic departments -a discipline whose ideas are now influencing other areas of economics, such as industrial organization, monetary policy, and asset pricing. The quality and the impact of the contributions that were made to the field during the last 40 years, and in particular in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, justify the widespread feeling that the “golden age” of corporate finance is behind us. Two excellent recent surveys of the main areas of corporate finance reinforce this sense: the capital structure survey by Harris and Raviv (1991) and the corporate governance survey by