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Corporations

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Abstract

A corporation is an artificial person with many of the rights of a biological one. The first business corporations pooled the savings of many individuals to permit ventures on a scale none could afford individually. Most large American and British corporations lack controlling shareholders; the consequent lack of monitoring and control gives rise to corporate governance problems reflecting the private benefits of control. The view that corporations should be run to maximize shareholder conflicts in many countries with the actual legal duties of corporate officers, and collides with evidence that stock prices are sometimes set by investors with incomplete information.

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Morck, R. (2018). Corporations. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_289

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