Two prominent progressive senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have recently proposed that employees should be allowed to elect 40 to 45 percent of the directors of large corporations. If implemented, such a reform would bring U.S.
corporate law substantially closer to European countries like Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, where worker codetermination has long been a central feature of corporate governance.
An extensive body of theoretical and empirical scholarship analyzes codetermination’s economic impact on corporations and their employees. This Article focuses on a different issue. It examines codetermination’s potential for protecting our democracy against the dangers inherent in the accumulation of extreme wealth and power by private corporations.
Concentrated corporate wealth creates the risk that corporations will use their resources to undermine democratic institutions. This Article argues that codetermination can mitigate this risk by splitting corporate voting rights between shareholders and employees, thereby playing a role that is broadly similar to that of the Constitutional separation of powers.
Using natural language processing, we identify and categorize the corporate goals in the shareholder letters of the 150 largest companies in the United...
One of the oldest corporate law issues – for whom is the corporation managed? – has become one of the hottest public policy issues of corporate law. The...
A common argument against divestment is that it jettisons voting power and that it has a small effect on stock prices. We argue that divestment is a form of...
In this paper, I analyse the main trade-offs between the economic value of the firm and its social value exploring how they are solved through corporate...