Good Company

"The weak economic case for shareholder primacy-and how policy can win back what's been lost. In the era of shareholder primacy, share price is king. Businesses operate with short-term goals to deliver profits to investors, enjoying stability (and bonuses) in the process. While the public may bemoan the doctrine for its insularity and wealth-consolidating effects, its influence over corporate governance persists. In Good Company, lawyer-economist Lenore Palladino offers a calibrating argument for why shareholder primacy was never all that legal to begin with. Corporations, Palladino shows, draw their power from public charters-agreements that allow corporations to enjoy all manner of operational benefits. In return, corporations are meant to innovate for the betterment of the societies that support them-to do what less-endowed operations cannot. That debt, increasingly wielded for stock buybacks and bonuses in the era of shareholder primacy, is not being repaid. Palladino theorizes a modern corporation that plays the role it was intended and delivers social and economic good in the process. Good Company is both an expert introduction to the political economy of the firm-as it was, as it is, as it can be-and a calibrating examination of how public policy can shape companies, and societies, for the better"--