| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w24720 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 24720 |
| Towards a Legal Theory of the Firm: The Effects of Enterprise Liability on Asset Partitioning, Decentralization and Corporate Group Growth | |
| Sharon Belenzon; Honggi Lee; Andrea Patacconi | |
| 发表日期 | 2018-06-18 |
| 出版年 | 2018 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Limited liability is a key attribute of the corporate form and one of the most important institutional innovations of the nineteenth century. However, when the owner of a corporation is another corporation as in many corporate groups, an important justification for limited liability—to protect small, passive investors from unlimited losses—is severely weakened. Accordingly, countries differ considerably in their propensity to protect parent and sister companies from the liabilities incurred by other group affiliates, with some countries (e.g. Germany) viewing a subsidiary as an integral part of the group that controls it while others (e.g. Great Britain) emphasizing the legal rather than the economic substance. In this paper, we construct a novel country-level measure of enterprise liability, the propensity of courts to hold an entire group liable for the obligations of one of its subsidiaries. Using data from sixteen countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, we examine how enterprise liability affects firm boundaries, internal organization, and corporate group growth. We find that in countries where enterprise liability is weaker, groups tend to partition their assets more finely into distinct legally independent subsidiaries and grant their subsidiaries more autonomy. Groups also tend to grow faster. This paper highlights one underappreciated channel—risk compartmentalization through incorporation—through which legal systems affect economic outcomes. |
| 主题 | Other ; Law and Economics ; Development and Growth ; Growth and Productivity ; Economic Systems |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w24720 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/582393 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Sharon Belenzon,Honggi Lee,Andrea Patacconi. Towards a Legal Theory of the Firm: The Effects of Enterprise Liability on Asset Partitioning, Decentralization and Corporate Group Growth. 2018. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w24720.pdf（690KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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