Organizations and Markets

Literature Review Bleg

26 March 2009 at 2:31 pm Dick Langlois Leave a comment

| Dick Langlois |

One of my graduate students has been working on an idea to formalize Henry Hansmann’s approach to the ownership of enterprise. Hansmann thinks about the ownership margin — which set of “patrons” in the nexus of contracts should own the residual rights of control and of income? The idea of this work would be to think simultaneously about the Coasean margin, the boundaries of the firm, which should be determined endogenously along with ownership. That means that firms would have different levels of vertical integration depending on which patrons own them. One interesting question: what happens to the level of vertical integration of banks if the government comes to own them?

We need to locate this idea in the literature and to find out if anyone else has done anything along these lines. So, if you know of anything remotely related, please send it along.

Entry filed under: - Langlois -, Corporate Governance, Theory of the Firm.