My forthcoming book, Corporate Governance, Promises Made, Promises Broken, presents my views about what corporate governance is all about and what sorts of corporate governance institutions and mechanisms work best. Corporate governance consists of a farrago of legal and economic devices that induce the people in charge of companies with publicly owned and traded stock to keep the promises they make to investors. This book develops three original insights about corporate governance. These insights can be succinctly summarized:

1. Corporate Governance is about promises. I believe that it is more accurate to characterize corporate governance as being about promises than it is to characterize corporate governance as being about contracts. One reason I believe this is because the relationship between public shareholders and the corporations is so attenuated than it is misleading to characterize their relationship with the corporation as contractual in nature, rather than promissory. Shareholders have almost no contractual rights and virtually no contractual rights to corporate cash flows. Shareholders’ investments are based on trust. This trust, in turn is based on the belief that the managers who run corporations will keep the promises that they make to investors. Another reason why I believe that corporate governance is about promise is because the idea of promise captures the primordial fact that trust rather than reliance on the prospect of enforcement is the focal point of a successful system of corporate governance.

2. Since corporate governance is about promise, then it stands to reason that the various institutions and mechanisms of corporate governance can be evaluated on the basis of how well they facilitate the keeping of promises by corporate managers. The bulk of this book analyzes various devices and mechanisms of corporate governance for the purpose of determining which ones work well and which do not work so well.

(more…)