This essay explores the feasibility of exporting U.S.-style corporate fiduciary duty rules to other nations. It suggests that fiduciary duty rules are best understood as open-ended standards of behavior that exhort corporate officers, directors, and controlling shareholders to focus on the firm's interests rather than their own, in circumstances where a failure to do this often would be difficult to punish. Put differently, fiduciary rules ask corporate insiders to show altruistic concern for the firm and its shareholders. Extensive empirical evidence demonstrates that altruistic behavior is in fact common, predictable, and reliable among U.S. subjects. However, a recent study also reports significant cross-cultural differences in altruistic behavior. The essay explores some possible sources of such cross-cultural differences, and what each implies about the challenges to be faced in transplanting fiduciary duty rules to other societies. In the process, it offers insight into the phenomenon often described as "culture".

Academics, reformers, and business leaders all yearn for a single, objective, easy-to-read measure of corporate performance that can be used to judge the quality of public corporation law and practice. This collective desire is so powerful that it has led many commentators to grab onto the first marginally plausible candidate: share price.

Contemporary economic and corporate theory (as well as recent business history) nevertheless warn us against unthinking acceptance of share price as a measure of corporate performance. This Essay offers a brief reminder of some of the many reasons why stock prices often fail to reflect true corporate performance, including the problem of private information; obstacles to effective arbitrage; investors' cognitive defects and biases; options theory and the problem of multiple residual claimants; and the problem of corporate spillover effects that erode diversified shareholders' returns. These considerations argue against assuming there is a tight connection between stock prices and underlying corporate wealth generation. A corporation or a corporate law system designed around the philosophy that anything that raises share price is good is likely to produce a firm that cooks its books; that avoids long-term projects that won't appeal to unsophisticated investors; that chases after investment fads and fancies; that tries to opportunistically exploit creditors, employees, and customers; and that pursues business strategies that harm its diversified shareholders' other investment interests.

The Essay concludes that, if we allow our desire for a universal performance measure to blind us to the fallibility of share price, we court costly error. The Essay examines three recent examples of just such erroneous triumphs of hope over experience: the rise and fall of the Revlon doctrine; the 1990s infatuation with options-based executive compensation; and academics' current preoccupation with event studies, regressions on Tobin's Q, and other forms of empirical scholarship that attempt to judge the quality of corporate law and practice according to changes in share price.

Why do investors in public corporations cede control over corporate assets and outputs to a board of directors, rather than retaining control for themselves? This Article reviews two possible explanations for why shareholders tolerate board control: the monitoring hypothesis, which posits that shareholders rely on boards primarily to control the "agency costs" associated with turning day-to-day control over the firm to self-interested corporate executives; and the mediating hypothesis, which posits that shareholders also seek to "tie their own hands" by ceding control to directors as a means of attracting the extracontractual, firm-specific investments of stakeholder groups such as creditors, executives, and employees. Part I of the Article reviews each hypothesis and concludes that each is theoretically plausible and internally consistent. As a result, the validity of each only can be established, or rejected, on the basis of empirical evidence.

Part II of the Article reviews the available empirical evidence. Many aspects of contemporary corporate law and governance seem, on first inspection, consistent with either the monitoring or the mediating model. In the context of corporate control transactions, however, it is possible to distinguish between legal rules and governance structures consistent with a purely monitoring board, and rules and structures consistent with a mediating board. Part II concludes that, as a positive matter, corporate takeover law is consistent with the view that directors are not just monitors, but also perform a mediating function. Recognizing this, commentators who subscribe only to the monitoring model often argue that the legal rules that govern changes of control are flawed and should be reformed. Part II demonstrates, however, that this normative claim is undermined by other empirical evidence, especially new evidence on the charter provisions of firms involved in initial public offerings.

Part III of the Article discusses some future directions for empirical research and identifies some pitfalls to be avoided. It concludes that, while the issue has not been resolved with certainty, at this point the empirical evidence favors the claim that directors do more than simply restrain executive opportunism; they also restrain shareholder opportunism, and so mediate between the firm's shareholders and other important constituencies that make extracontractual specific investments in the firm. What's more, shareholders favor this arrangement. Accordingly, the burden of proof should shift to those who would defend a purely monitoring model of the board.

Legal experts traditionally distinguish corporations from unincorporated business forms by focusing on such corporate characteristics as limited shareholder liability, centralized management, perpetual life, and freely transferred shares. While this approach has value, this essay argues that the nature of the corporation can be better understood by focusing on a fifth, often-overlooked, characteristic of corporations: their capacity to lock in equity investors' initial capital contributions by making it far more difficult for those investors to subsequently withdraw assets from the firm. Like a tar pit, a corporation is much easier for equity investors to get into, than to get out of.

An emerging school of theorists has begun to explore the implications of this idea for corporate law and practice. The idea is still novel enough to lack a uniformly-accepted label - in addition to the phrase capital lock-in, scholars have described this aspect of incorporation as affirmative asset partitioning, the absence of a repurchase condition, and asset separation from shareholders. Whatever label one chooses, the idea shows great promise for illuminating a variety of thorny problems that have long troubled corporate scholars and practitioners.

In illustration, this essay considers how the idea of capital lock-in sheds light on three corporate mysteries: the sui generis nature of corporate directors' fiduciary duties; the rise of the large modern service partnership; and lawmakers' enthusiasm for meddling with corporate governance rules.

One of the most important questions in corporate governance is how directors of public corporations can be motivated to serve the interests of the firm. Directors frequently hold only small stakes in the companies they manage. Moreover, a variety of legal rules and contractual arrangements insulate them from liability for business failures. Why then should we expect them to do a good job?

Conventional corporate scholarship has great difficulty wrestling with this question, in large part because conventional scholarship usually adopts the economist's assumption that directors are rational actors motivated purely by self-interest. This homo economicus model of behavior may be fundamentally misleading when applied to corporate directors. The institution of the corporate board is premised on the expectation, and the experience, of director altruism, in the form of a sense of obligation to the firm and its shareholders. As a result, to properly understand the role and conduct of corporate directors, we must take into account the empirical phenomenon of altruism.

One potential starting point for such a project can be found in the extensive evidence that has been developed over the past four decades on altruism among strangers in experimental games. This evidence demonstrates that altruistic behavior is in fact quite common. More important, it is predictable. A variety of factors can reliably increase, or decrease, the incidence of altruism observed in experimental games. These results may offer a foundation for building a model of human behavior that is both more accurate and more useful than the homo economicus model. They also carry important implications for how we select, educate, regulate, and compensate corporate directors.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Efficient Capital Market Hypothesis (ECMH) became one of the most widely-accepted and influential ideas in finance economics. More recently, however, the idea of market efficiency has fallen into disrepute as a result of market events and growing empirical evidence of inefficiencies. This essay argues that the weaknesses of the efficient market theory are, and were, apparent from a careful inspection of its initial premises, including the presumptions of homogeneous investor expectations, effective arbitrage, and investor rationality. By the same token, a wide range of market phenomena inconsistent with the ECHM can be explained using market models that modify these three assumptions. In illustration, this Article explores three important strands of today's finance literature: (1) the expanding body of work on asset pricing when investors have heterogeneous expectations; (2) recent theoretical and empirical scholarship on how and why arbitrage may move certain types of publicly available information into price more slowly and incompletely than earlier writings suggested; and (3) the exploding literature in behavioral finance, which examines what happens to prices when market participants do not all share rational expectations. Taken together, these three bodies of work show signs of providing the essential framework on which a new and more powerful working model of securities markets can be built.