Collapsing Corporate Structures: Resolving the Tension Between Form and Substance

Opus Alchemicum explores the fabrication of “reality” upon imagination, and the affective relation between ideas and matter in the built environment. Like an alchemic experiment, through the manipulation of real facts and their transformation into myth, stories, rituals and objects, the project tries to demonstrate how myths are not just produced but also produce “real” by creating a collective understanding and a pattern of relations, roles and ideas. This project’s attempt is to reveal the mechanisms of reality in an act of analogy. The role of architecture, buildings and objects is investigated in its transfigured correspondent. Myths are both constructed and revealed as the language code of a discourse. The result is a work of alchemy, a product of imagination as a path of understanding. The project starts with traveling to Romania as a study case, in a journey where encounters and empathy win over maps and scheduled visits. What I bring back with me is a series of situations, assemblages, a pattern of history, places, culture and affections belonging to the very present of Romania.These situations are plunged in another larger assemblage, the European one, with Sweden as a partaker. In this country’s desires and metamorphoses we can discover those myths that belong and affect our culture and our spaces.  Opus Alchemicum is a tale about myths, behavior and built environment. About Romania, or somewhere else. About ruins and gold. About invisible values and material affects. About a vanished land, about desire and nostalgia. About displacement, diaspora and costumes. About migration. About a journey and the gas station at the mid of the road. About metamorphoses, gypsy palaces and dowries. About matter, produced, traded and extinguished. About Prussian Blue and honey. About a tower, a fountain and a secret garden. About the alchemic process of making reality out of ideas. Opus Alchemicum utforskar fabricering av verklighet genom fantasi, den affektiva relationen mellan ide och materia i en bygg omgivning. Ett alkemiskt experiment, genom manipulation av verkliga fakta och deras transformation till myter, berättelser, ritualer och objekt, försöker detta projekt att påvisa hur myter inte bara är producerade utan hur de också producerar en ”verklighet” genom att skapa en kollektiv förståelse och ett mönster av relationer, roller och föreställningar. Projektet försöker att avslöja mekanismerna av verklighet i en handling av analogi. Rollen av arkitektur, byggnader och objekt undersöks i sin förvandlade korrespondens. Myter är både konstruerade och avslöjade genom språkkoden för en diskurs. Resultatet är ett verk av alkemi, en produkt av inbillningsförmåga längst en väg för förståelse. Projektet startar med en resa till Rumänien som studie fall, i en färd där möten och empati segrar över kartor och schemalagda möten. Det jag tog med mig tillbaka var en serie av situationer, samlingar och mönster av historien. Platser, kultur och känslor som representerar det nuvarande Rumänien. Situationer som störtar in till ett större sammanhang i form av det Europeiska med Sverige som deltagare. I detta lands önskningar och metamorfoser kan vi upptäcka de myter som tillhör och påverkar vår kultur och dess rum. Opus Alchemicum är en berättelse om myter, beteenden och byggd omgivning. Om Rumänien eller någon annanstans. Om ruiner och guld. Om osynliga värden och materiell inverkan. Om ett försvunnet land av begär och nostalgi. Om förskjutningar, förskingringar och kostymer. Om migration. Om färder och bensinstationen i mitten av resan. Om metamorfoser, romerska palats och hemgifter. Om materia, producerad, handlad och utsläckt. Om preussiskt blått och honung. Om ett torn en fontän och en hemlig trädgård. Om den alkemiska processen av att skapa verklighet genom idéer

Business Groups in Emerging Markets - Substitutes for Missing Institutions

Abstract: Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. We study how business groups can substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. In a two period model, there is no contract enforcement in the first period. The firms within the business group are connected to each other by a vertical production structure, resulting in externalities due to double marginalization, and an internal capital market. Our model derives the sequencing of investments and the credit contract offered by the headquarters that solve the ex post moral hazard problem. Thus, the business group's organizational mode and the financial structure facilitate relational contracting

Rethinking Freedom of Contract: A Bankruptcy Paradigm

This Article tests the limits of private contracting by examining what it means to contract about bankruptcy. Bankruptcy law if governed by a statutory code that defines the relationship between debtors and creditors when a debtor enters the bankruptcy regulatory scheme. May debtors and creditors contract in advance to change that relationship? Or would these contracts be Faustian bargains that the state should not enforce? Both courts and scholars are in conflict, yet the answer is critical because it affects not only bankruptcy costs but also the structuring of corporate reorganizations and securitization transactions. I maintain that the threshold question--what freedom should parties or should not be allowed to contractually alter statutory schemes. I then apply those principles to a model of prebankruptcy contracting by taking into account the policies underlying the bankruptcy code and also by analyzing the extent to which, under contract law, externalities should render a contract unenforceable. I conclude that, within defined limits, bankruptcy law should be viewed as default provisions and not as mandatory rules. Finally I show that my model of prebankruptcy contracting can have important applications, not only to making corporate reorganizations and securitizations transactions more efficient but also to understanding when parties should be allowed to contract about statutory schemes generally and when externalities should override freedom of contract

Business Groups in Emerging Markets - Financial Control and Sequential Investment

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected to each other by a vertical production structure and an internal capital market. Thus, the business group’s organizational mode and the financial structure allow a self-enforcing contract to be designed. Our model of a business group shows that only sequential investments can solve the ex post moral hazard problem. We also find that firms may prefer not to integrate

Business Groups in Emerging Markets-Financial Control & Sequential Investment

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected to each other by a vertical production structure and an internal capital market. Thus, the business group’s organizational mode and the financial structure allow a self-enforcing contract to be designed. Our model of a business group shows that only sequential investments can solve the ex post moral hazard problem. We also find that firms may prefer not to integrate.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57210/1/wp830 .pd

Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance in the Public Interest: The Case of Systemic Risk

There’s long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty—that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes, because imposing specific regulatory requirements and making certain actions illegal or tortious can mitigate the harm without unduly impairing corporate wealth production. Whether that is true in other contexts, this paper—delivered as the keynote address at the June 2016 National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School—questions if it’s true in the context of systemic economic harm. The paper argues that corporate governance law should require some duty to the public in order to help mitigate that harm. Even if imperfect, such a duty represents an important step towards shaping corporate governance norms to begin to take the public into account

Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance in the Public Interest: The Case of Systemic Risk

There’s long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty—that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes, because imposing specific regulatory requirements and making certain actions illegal or tortious can mitigate the harm without unduly impairing corporate wealth production. Whether that is true in other contexts, this paper—delivered as the keynote address at the June 2016 National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School—questions if it’s true in the context of systemic economic harm. The paper argues that corporate governance law should require some duty to the public in order to help mitigate that harm. Even if imperfect, such a duty represents an important step towards shaping corporate governance norms to begin to take the public into account

African small and medium enterprises, networks, and manufacturing performance

This paper examines the role of private support institutions in determining small and medium enterprise (SME) growth and performance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It finds that SMEs in SSA get around market failures and lack of formal institutions by creating private governance systems in the form of long-term business relationships and tight, ethnically-based, business networks. There are important links between these informal governance institutions and SME performance. Networks raise the performance of"insiders"and, in the sparse business environments of the SSA region, have attendant negative consequences for market participation of"outsiders,"such as indigenous African SMEs. This is indicated through the determinants of access to supplier credit. Policy interventions will be needed to improve the platform for relation-based governance mechanisms and to address the exclusionary effects of tight networks.Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Business in Development,Business Environment,Technology Industry

Business Groups in Emerging Markets - Substitutes for Missing Institutions

Abstract: Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. We study how business groups can substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. In a two period model, there is no contract enforcement in the first period. The firms within the business group are connected to each other by a vertical production structure, resulting in externalities due to double marginalization, and an internal capital market. Our model derives the sequencing of investments and the credit contract offered by the headquarters that solve the ex post moral hazard problem. Thus, the business group's organizational mode and the financial structure facilitate relational contracting.Business groups; internal capital market; institutions