The Efficiency Costs of Dividend Taxation with Managerial Firms*

The paper provides a positive and efficiency analysis of dividend taxation in a corporate agency model with a costly managerial effort. Unlike existing (agency) models, this model is consistent with empirical work in corporate finance and able to predict empirically observed investment responses to dividend taxation. In addition, we show that investment changes are not sufficient to infer, first, the efficiency cost of dividend taxation and, second, the financing regime underlying firms’ investments. We provide a testable implication that allows to empirically uncover the source of investment finance by comparing investment responses to dividend taxes and managerial incentive pay.

Financial Management Tools in Corporate Agency Conflicts

The article provides the substantiation of the concept of agency theory from the position of financial management in the direction of the agency problem that exists between agents and owners in view of diverse interests, dispersion of equity capital in corporate structures. The influence of internal agency conflicts on the financial results of the company's activity, their relation to the implementation of financial management tools is considered. Consequently, there is a need to systematize agency relations into horizontal and vertical, which together form a system of external and internal relations, and also complement the classification of agency contradictions in the direction of collisions of interests between the head office and branches, functional divisions of the corporation, the parent organization and subsidiaries. An increase in the role of financial levers and indicators based on the distribution of net, operating, reinvested profits in solving the agency problem allows not only to reveal the specific characteristics of the contradictions between the management and the owners of the corporation on the distribution of financial resources, to structure intracorporate interactions, to determine the nature of the negative financial consequences for the owners of the corporation, but and set the direction for the development of financial management tools to eliminate them. The theoretical aspects of corporate agency relations and related conflicts are supplemented, from the angle of the agency problem of managers and shareholders, the expansion of the subject perspective of the study of the problematic of tools in solving corporate agency conflicts. The development of theoretical ones is continued, it is presented in the essence of intra-corporate agency conflicts, financial management tools in their solution, substantiation and development of methods in the development of the concept of agency theory.

Hobbes and the Personality of the State

This chapter lays the groundwork for the Hobbesian theory of state responsibility. It first sets out to determine what exactly Thomas Hobbes means when he says that the state is a person. Scholars of state and corporate responsibility, and even many Hobbes scholars, have failed to appreciate the novelty of Hobbes' idea of state personality because they have projected the idea of corporate agency — the core of the agential theory — back onto Hobbes. The chapter shows that it is possible to recover a novel understanding of state personality from Hobbes if one resists the urge to read him through the contemporary literature on corporate agency. What makes Hobbes' idea of personhood unique and valuable is that it decouples personhood from metaphysical conceptions of agency; it explains how states and other entities can be persons even though they do not have any intrinsic capacity for rationality, intentionality, or action.

Social partners’ bargaining strategies in Germany and Spain after the introduction of the Euro: A morphogenetic perspective on corporate agency

This article addresses how far wage imbalances in the Eurozone can be imputable to intentional agency by collective bargaining organizations. Using Archer’s morphogenetic approach, we explain the agentic role of social partners in core (Germany) and periphery (Spain) cases, in relation with the respective collective bargaining regimes. We show that the capacity of macro- and meso-level organizations to effect wage-setting practices can be constrained inadvertently by contextual influences with morphostatic properties, generating constrained modes of corporate agency. Yet wage moderation is best understood as a form of agency itself, functioning ‘by being’ rather than ‘doing’, which over time can become more innovative. We contrast this finding with the less constrained capacity of more institutionalized corporate agents, such as transnational business corporations and central state agencies.

Collectives and Their Duties

This chapter fleshes out the Tripartite Model’s conception of collectives and defends the attribution of duties to them. It begins by giving a detailed characterization of collectives and explaining how they have the specifically moral type of agency that’s at issue in duties. It explains that this conception of collectives is permissive (i.e. its conditions are easy to satisfy). The conception is compared with other prominent accounts of corporate agency or personhood. The final section argues in favour of including collectives’ duties within our ontology. This argument has two planks. First, collectives are able to make decisions based on duties. Second, those decisions are to produce an outcome that would not be produced if each of the collective’s members severally made decisions: the outcome of robust multilateralism (coordinated role-performance) amongst members. At a general level of description, a collective’s duty will be a duty to produce multilateralism amongst members—a decision that no member can sensibly take on their own.

The Outsourced Legal Translation Environment

Chapter 1 situates outsourced legal translation in its environment, examining the specific features of the market, and introduces corporate agency theory as a lens through which to research the commissioning and performance of legal translation from and by external practitioners, enriched with certain functionalist translation theories. Issues of status, cursory orders, and heterogeneous quality are discussed, together with the effects of accelerated technological developments and globalization. The complexity of interaction and power play between actors in the market and associated risk potential are discussed, and a model of the chain of supply is presented, along with profiles of key stakeholders.