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What Role Do Corporations Play in Society?

Forming a corporation helps people to organize themselves in a way to accomplish different goals. Almost anyone can set up a corporation and there are clear rules for basic operations. Professor Julia Mahoney discusses how for-profit corporations drive economic growth and non-profit corporations contribute to societal welfare. https://youtube.com/watch?v=hfUiXre14iw

Transcript

Corporations can do what people want to do, and they're a way for people to organize themselves, for people to get together, for example, and to do something that would be difficult to do on their own. It's a way for people to coordinate their behavior, whether they're pooling money to make investments, or whether or not they are coming together in order to form a non-profit corporation that will be involved in the political process in a way that would be difficult for individuals to be involved on their own. We can think about corporations as ways of coordinated human behavior. They are transparent. It's very easy to set up a corporation. They are quite simple to run. We have well-understood mechanisms in the form of a board of directors to make corporate decisions. Both for-profit and non-profit corporations have key roles to play in society. For-profit corporations are one of the engines of economic growth. When we think about the corporate form, its development, the extraordinary flexibility that those who found and run corporations have been accorded by our system of corporate law, what we see is the ability of business organizations to respond quickly and supplely to massive changes. Corporations are a real force of dynamism. So we understand why having general incorporation laws, that is allowing pretty much anyone to form a corporation, having thriving capital markets so that for-profit corporations can raise money, both in the form of debt and equity that they need for operations, we understand why that has been associated with the sort of meteoric economic growth that began in the 18th century and that really got underway with even more momentum in the 19th century and has continued to the present day. Non-profit corporations are a bit more complicated. Non-profit corporations do not have shareholders, do not have owners in the sense that for-profit corporations do. Non-profit corporations are typically set up and then have a board of directors that administers that non-profit corporation. Non-profit corporations typically have a kind of social welfare mission. Non-profit corporations might have an explicitly charitable mission, such as to found a hospital or a university and then operate it, or a soup kitchen. Non-profit corporations also sometimes have public welfare missions that are not explicitly charitable, or not the first thing that one thinks of when one hears the word charitable. So, for example, a lot of political organizations are non-profit corporations. The Citizens United case, one of the most famous cases that the United States Supreme Court has ever decided about corporations involved a non-profit corporation that was formed and operated in order to be a participant in the political process.

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