2020-2021

Neoliberalism and the corporate economy stand in fundamental contradiction. Corporations are state franchises and thus violate neoliberal strictures against state intervention in the economy. To reconcile the corporation with the free market, neoliberals retheorize it as, instead, a private partnership of stockholders, recasting executives as stockholder “agents.” But this only generates further contradictions. Applying a version of agency theory distorted by game theory premises, neoliberals propose, in effect, that executives be bribed with stock-based pay to prioritize stockholder payouts. This massively reallocates firm revenues: from reinvestment and workers, to executives and stockholders. As a result, neoliberalism does not supercharge capital accumulation, as widely assumed, but decapitalizes the corporation, the state, and the worker in order to enrich the stockholder and stock-compensated executive. In contradiction to its professed ideals, neoliberalism applied to a corporate economy lowers investment, slows growth, heightens irresponsibility, intensifies worker coercion, and sharply raises economic inequality.

In recent years, following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, we have witnessed the formation of new monetary policy. Its novelty exists both in its theoretical contours, and in its implementation techniques. This paper describes and analyzes three new monetary tools adapted after the crisis: interest on reserves, renewed open market operations and the use of the Fed’s own balance sheets. The current monetary debate addresses monetary tools as the neutral “plumbing” of the system. I argue that the “plumbing” (read: infrastructure) is of significance, as it sets the route of money, and the places that it will reach along this route. The new monetary tools encourage the growth of shadow banking, and are likely to increase financial speculation, financialization and inequality. Monetary tools thus shape the financial system, and consequently the real economy. I pose that while the new monetary tools may well serve their interim goals (such as influencing the short-term interest rates), they may damage their ultimate goal of serving the real economy. This state of affairs calls for a (so far missing) coherent legal debate over the substantive powers of the Fed, their legal reasoning and justifications.

Times are changing. The early 21st century will be remembered for its shift in global economic power dynamics which challenged some of our fundamental understandings about law and the economy. Within three decades, China has fostered the growth of globally prominent firms and its capital market advanced as the world’s second most meaningful market. Heavy state ownership, strong politicized control, and weakly functioning legal institutions did not stand in the way of China’s economic ascent. Chinese firms—many of which are subject to an illiberal, political governance—are increasingly integrated with the global market and attract domestic and global investors and business partners. The rise of these firms casts a heavy shadow of doubt on development assumptions and conventional corporate governance theories. 

This Article reveals the functions of illiberal political governance, based on which many of these firms operate, and assesses its implications for global investors and policymakers outside China. Political institutions—specifically, the Chinese Communist Party anti- corruption apparatus—are deployed within and outside many Chinese firms (regardless of state ownership or their geographic operations) and substitute for orthodox corporate governance monitoring and accountability. Against all expectations, illiberal, politicized corporate governance, is able to attract domestic and global investors to Chinese firms. The Article thus argues that the puzzling allure of Chinese public firms can be partially explained not despite the function of “bad” corporate governance institutions, but because of them. 

As the influence of Chinese firms extends beyond their home country, the system that governs them has substantial implications for their foreign transacting parties, public investors (global and domestic), and the markets in which they trade and operate. Against the backdrop of the U.S.-China trade war and rising calls for an economic decoupling from China, policymakers worldwide are trying to comprehend the various implications of China’s economic ascent while considering regulatory and policy responses. Yet while aspects of trade, security, and labor carry the headlines, corporate governance is largely absent from the discussion. This Article fills this gap. By providing a comprehensive analysis of China’s illiberal and political corporate governance, one that considers the perils as well as the (perhaps surprising) promises of political governance in Chinese public firms, this Article presents a fresh and novel perspective as to the implications of China’s economic ascent for public investors.

Regardless of the enormous risks to humanity, the three-decades-long international effort to administer sustainability has seen an intensifying process of governance privatization, coupled with a failure to reduce global emissions. Bridging neo-institutional and business-class theories, I examine the mobilization of a class-wide coalition of major transnational corporations on a long-term institutional project to shape environmental governance in the mold of a private, market-based institutional logic. Drawing from analyses of the structure, discourse, and activities of the transnational business association World Business Council for Sustainable Development circa 1990–2010, I show how the WBCSD unites the CEOs of some of the largest transnational corporations into a cohesive leadership group, mobilizes the corporate resources they command, and coordinates global-scale, durable institutional creation work. The project’s purpose is to crowd out the state-based logic of environmental governance, thus restricting the development of market-incongruent sustainability organizing. The article contributes to the understanding of societal-level, large-scale institutional work by examining the key agency of business classes in such work, the organization of large-scale work through multifaceted projects, and its orientation to set institutional logics through diverse creation of institutional forms that embody the logic.

Who holds power in corporate America? Scholars have invariably answered this question in the language of ownership and control. This paper argues that tackling this question today requires a new language. Whereas the comparative political economy literature has long treated dispersed ownership and weak shareholders as core features of the U.S. political economy, a century-long process of re-concentration has consolidated shareholdings in the hands of a few very large asset management companies. In an historically unprecedented configuration, this emerging asset manager capitalism is dominated by fully diversified shareholders that lack direct economic interest in the performance of individual portfolio companies. The paper compares this new corporate governance regime to its predecessors; reconstructs the history of the growth and consolidation of the asset management sector; and examines the political economy of asset manager capitalism, both at the firm level and at the macroeconomic level.

In this chapter from a manuscript in progress, I explore the popularity of the fusion of a high-tech future and a medieval past in the libertarian thought-worlds of the 1990s. I home in on the frequently- observed phenomenon of the "new middle ages" in the decade as gated communities and Homeowners Associations proliferated and the Internet opened up a new space of exchange. The intellectuals I follow, including Gordon Tullock, Bruce Benson, David Friedman, James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, celebrated this revival of these features of an earlier era, casting hyper-fragmentation and polycentrism as a normative model for a libertarian future.

kThis article uses the records of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) to examine the economic life and experience of African American entrepreneurs in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as the “golden age” of black business, this era saw the proliferation of African-American owned businesses, despite an increase in discrimination and racial persecution that characterized the United States since the turn of the century. The NNBL is a well-known organization that receives little scholarly focus and is often considered only as an extension of the career of its founder Booker T. Washington. However, I argue that the League is a window into the world of African American proprietors and shopkeepers. The annual conventions of the NNBL enabled a diverse group of business owners, entrepreneurs, and professional men and women to exchange ideas and help one another navigate the segregated and uneven infrastructures of American capitalism.

Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people are rich in the space of capital and labor income. We combine survey and administrative data to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States since 1950. In 1950, 10% of top decile capital-income earners were also in the top decile of labor income. Today, this indicator is 30%. This makes the traditional division to capitalists and laborers less relevant today. We find that the increase in labor income inequality contributed to the rising homoploutia, which in turn explains 20% of the increase in interpersonal income inequality since 1986.

The last ten years have witnessed an impressive revival for ‘Universal Basic Income’ (UBI) proposals. Conceived as an unconditional and universal grant paid to every citizen, the so- called ‘UBI’ has managed to galvanize conservative and progressive spirits alike. The history of the UBI itself, however, has rarely been the object of sustained scholarly attention. Our book offers the first global account of how Universal Basic Income went from an esoteric idea confined to economic textbooks to a full-blown planetary movement. Its aim is radically historicist, combining social, economic, and intellectual history for a total overview of the changes that brought forth the current basic income scene. And rather than inscribing the growing popularity of UBI into a long teleology dating back to authors such as Thomas More, the book opts for a narrower but more rewarding focus. Instead, it looks at a series of conceptual shocks that rocked the post-war industrial order in the 1960s and 1970s – first in the US, then in Europe, then in the Global South – and how these turned Universal Basic Income policies into an elegant tool to deconstruct key tenets of classical welfare policy – offering a form of “welfare without the welfare state”, as Chicago economist Arthur Kemp put it in 1966.