Corporate Governance and Corporate Employment: Is Prosperity Sustainable in the United States?

Abstract

If sustainable prosperity is the objective, proposals to reform the corporate governance system must be based on a theory of the innovative enterprise. Without such a theory, stakeholder arguments run the risk of encouraging other groups, besides stockholders, to become claimants to a given, and even diminishing pool of returns. To avoid such a political and economic stalemate requires a conception of how investments in people working together in organizations can generate the returns in international contributions to the corporate governance debate, economists must shed the shackles - both methodological and ideological -- of an economic theory that was never designed to understand how an economy develops, and build their own capabilities for analyzing the processes of industrial innovation, international competition, and the social foundations of sustainable prosperity.

JEL Classification: G30