This paper provides a comprehensive review of the empirical literature in transaction cost economics (TCE) across multiple social science disciplines and business fields. We show how TCE has branched out from its economic roots to examine empirical phenomena in several other areas. We find TCE is increasingly being applied not only to business-related fields such as accounting, finance, marketing, and organizational theory, but also to areas outside of business including political science, law, public policy, and agriculture and health. With few exceptions, however, the use of TCE reasoning to inform empirical research in these areas is piecemeal. We find that there is considerable support of many of the central tenets of TCE, but we also observe a number of lingering theoretical and empirical issues that need to be addressed. We conclude by discussing the implications of these issues and outlining directions for future theoretical and empirical work.

MNCs are increasingly facing global environmental issues demanding coordinated market and non-market strategic responses. The home country institutional context and individual company histories can create divergent pressures on strategy for MNCs based in different countries; however, the location of MNCs in global industries and their participation in ‘global issues arenas’ create issue-level fields within which strategic convergence might also be expected. This paper analyzes the responses of oil MNCs to climate change and finds that local context influenced initial corporate reactions, but that convergent pressures predominate as the issue matures.

Corporate codes of conduct, product certifications, process standards, and other voluntary, non-governmental forms of private governance have proliferated in the last two decades. These innovations are a response to social pressures unleashed by globalization and the inadequacy of governmental institutions for addressing its social and environmental impacts. Private governance has had some notable successes, but there are clear limits to what it alone can be expected to accomplish. We hypothesize that the effectiveness of private governance depends on four main factors: 1) the structure of the particular global value chain in which production takes place; 2) the extent to which demand for a firm's products relies on its brand identity; 3) the possibilities for collective action by consumers, workers, or other activists to exert pressure on producers; and 4) the extent to which commercial interests of lead firms align with social and environmental concerns. Taken together, these hypotheses suggest that private governance will flourish in only a limited set of circumstances. With the trend towards consolidation of production in the largest developing countries, however, we also see a strengthening of some forms of public governance. Private governance will not disappear, but it will be linked to emerging forms of multi-stakeholder institutions.

There is a vast empirical literature on the allocation of corporate PAC contributions in Congressional elections and the influence that these contributions have on the policy-making process. The attention given to PAC contributions is far in excess of their actual importance. Corporate PAC contributions account for about 10% of Congressional campaign spending and major corporations allocate far more money to lobbying or philanthropy than their affiliated PACs make in contributions.

This paper explores the implications of going beyond transaction cost theory's implicit focus on domestic investors to include multinational actors. As developed herein, the discriminating alignment between the level of hazards (contractual and/or political) and the mode of governance carries over. In the open-economy context, such an alignment reflects the hazards that arise from the nature of the transaction and those that arise from the nature of the political and regulatory environment.

We examine corporate donations to political candidates for federal offices in the United States from 1991 to 2004. Firms that donate have operating characteristics consistent with the existence of a free cash flow problem, and donations are negatively correlated with returns. A $10,000 increase in donations is associated with a reduction in annual excess returns of 7.4 basis points. Worse corporate governance is associated with larger donations. Even after controlling for corporate governance, donations are associated with lower returns. Donating firms engage in more acquisitions and their acquisitions have significantly lower cumulative abnormal announcement returns than non-donating firms. We find virtually no support for the hypothesis that donations represent an investment in political capital. Instead, political donations are symptomatic of agency problems within firms. Our results are particularly useful in light of the Citizens United ruling, which is likely to greatly increase the use of corporate funds for political donations.

Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active toward passive investment strategies. The passive index fund industry is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which we call the “Big Three.” We comprehensively map the ownership of the Big Three in the United States and find that together they constitute the largest shareholder in 88 percent of the S&P 500 firms. In contrast to active funds, the Big Three hold relatively illiquid and permanent ownership positions. This has led to opposing views on incentives and possibilities to actively exert shareholder power. Some argue passive investors have little shareholder power because they cannot “exit,” while others point out this gives them stronger incentives to actively influence corporations. Through an analysis of proxy vote records we find that the Big Three do utilize coordinated voting strategies and hence follow a centralized corporate governance strategy. However, they generally vote with management, except at director (re-)elections. Moreover, the Big Three may exert “hidden power” through two channels: First, via private engagements with management of invested companies; and second, because company executives could be prone to internalizing the objectives of the Big Three. We discuss how this development entails new forms of financial risk.

Most current theoretical treatments view business associations as rent-seeking, special interest groups. Yet, empirical research in a wide range of developing countries reveals a broad range of functions and activities undertaken by business associations, many of which promote efficiency. These positive functions address crucial development issues (emphasized in the New Institutional Economics) such as strengthening property rights, facilitating vertical and horizontal coordination, reducing information costs, and upgrading worker training. The associations that engage in these developmental activities tend to be well organized and staffed. This institutional strength depends in turn on high member density, valuable selective benefits (often delegated by governments), and effective internal mediation of member interests. In addition external factors, especially competitive markets and government pressure, encourage associations to use their institutional strength for productive ends.

This essay highlights productive ways in which scholars have reanimated the concept of structural power to explain puzzles in international and comparative politics. Past comparative scholarship stressed the dependence of the state on holders of capital, but it struggled to reconcile this supposed dependence with the frequent losses of business in political battles. International relation (IR) scholars were attentive to the power of large states, but mainstream IR neglected the ways in which the structure of global capitalism makes large companies international political players in their own right. To promote a unified conversation between international and comparative political economy, structural power is best conceptualized as a set of mutual dependencies between business and the state. A new generation of structural power research is more attentive to how the structure of capitalism creates opportunities for some companies (but not others) vis-à-vis the state, and the ways in which that structure creates leverage for some states (but not others) to play off companies against each other. Future research is likely to put agents – both states and large firms – in the foreground as political actors, rather than showing how the structure of capitalism advantages all business actors in the same way against non-business actors.

Firms operate in a capital market, a product market, and a market for social pressure directed at them by social activists, NGOs, and governments. An equilibrium in these three markets yields a three-equation structural model that relates corporate financial performance (CFP), corporate social performance (CSP), and social pressure. This paper estimates the simultaneous equation model for a panel of over 1,600 firms and finds that CFP is uncorrelated with CSP and negatively correlated with social pressure. CSP is decreasing in CFP and increasing in social pressure. Social pressure is increasing in CSP and decreasing in CFP, which is consistent with social pressure being directed to soft targets. Disaggregating the panel indicates that CFP is positively correlated with CSP for firms in consumer markets and negatively correlated for industrial markets. For consumer markets, CSP is increasing in CFP, which is consistent with a perquisites hypothesis that managers spend on CSR when they can afford it. For industrial markets CSP is decreasing in CFP, which is consistent with a moral management hypothesis. For both consumer and industrial markets, CSP is responsive to social pressure.

Technology costs and deployment rates, represented in experience curves, are typically seen as the main factors in the global clean energy transition from fossil fuels towards low-carbon energy sources. We argue that politics is the hidden dimension of technology experience curves, as it affects both costs and deployment. We draw from empirical analyses of diverse North American and European cases to describe patterns of political conflict surrounding clean energy adoption across a variety of technologies. Our analysis highlights that different political logics shape costs and deployment at different stages along the experience curve. The political institutions and conditions that nurture new technologies into economic winners are not always the same conditions that let incumbent technologies become economic losers. Thus, as the scale of technology adoption moves from niches towards systems, new political coalitions are necessary to push complementary system-wide technology. Since the cost curve is integrated globally, different countries can contribute to different steps in the transition as a function of their individual comparative political advantages.

Systems for certifying sustainable resource use and decent labor conditions have become prominent modes of private regulation at the transnational level. But serious questions remain about how these global standards are put into practice in particular places, especially in developing countries. Drawing on fieldwork in Indonesia, this paper examines the growth of certification of sustainable forestry (e.g., through the Forest Stewardship Council) and certification of decent labor conditions in factories (e.g., through Social Accountability International). Based on the controversy that surrounded both sweatshops and deforestation in Indonesia, and the export dependence of both the apparel/footwear and forest products sectors, these would appear to be prime candidates for the application of certification. Yet in both sectors, the growth of multi-stakeholder certification has been limited. Furthermore, private regulation in Indonesia has taken somewhat divergent paths in these two sectors, which shapes certification's significance at the point of production. The paper examines how the socio-legal context of certification, the character of supply chain relationships, and possible differences in the politics of labor and the environment can help to explain these patterns and contribute to a richer sense of private regulation's “on the ground” manifestations.

This paper seeks to explain the success of two NGOs in creating standards for calculating and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the level of an entire company. These emissions accounting standards, called the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, have been widely adopted by multinational firms, emissions reporting registries, and even an emissions trading scheme. The paper traces the widespread adoption of the standards, and then offers an explanation for this successful instance of private regulation. It presents a supply and demand model of private entrepreneurial authority—where private actors project authority without delegation by states. The two NGOs were successful rule-makers because they were able meet a demand for three benefits to potential users of the standard: reduced transaction costs, first-mover advantage, and an opportunity to burnish their reputation as environmental leaders. The paper also explains the supply of private authority—that is, why we see entrepreneurial authority rather than delegation by states. The disagreement among developed countries on the appropriate role for emissions trading in the climate regime delayed action on developing firm-level accounting methodologies. Moreover, the relative weakness of the focal institution in the climate regime—the climate change Secretariat—meant that there was no obvious international organization to take up the task of creating new measurement tools.

This paper provides a model of integrated market and nonmarket strategies in the context of an industry facing regulation that differentially affects the firms in the industry. The regulation is chosen in a majority rule institution, and to affect the stringency of the regulation, the firms in the industry can take nonmarket action in the form of providing support to legislators based on how they vote. The nonmarket action is considered in the context of client and interest group politics, where the latter involves competition with an environmental interest group. An integrated strategy is composed of the firm's strategy for its market environment and its strategy for its nonmarket environment. Also the integrated strategies of the firms must constitute an equilibrium in their market competition and an equilibrium for their nonmarket competition, including that with the environmental interest group. Collective action in the form of coalition building and rent chain mobilization is also considered.

In recent years, International Political Economy literature on “politics beyond state” has emphasized the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in broader policy processes, both national and international. In addition to their impact on states, NGOs influence the policies of non-state actors such as firms via public and private politics. Dissatisfied with the progress firms have made in response to public regulation, NGOs have sponsored private authority regimes in several issue areas and pushed firms to participate in them. Across the world, the contest between NGOs and firms has provoked substantial behavioral and programmatic change'including widespread participation in these private authority regimes'among firms seeking to escape NGO pressures. Using firm-level data, this paper examines why direct targeting has not led firms in the U.S. forest products sector to participate in an NGO-sponsored private authority regime, the Forest Stewardship Council. This global regime has been adopted widely in Europe, but U.S.-based forestry firms have tended to favor a domestic industry-sponsored regime, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. Our analysis suggests that the desire of firms to maintain control over their institutional environment in light of hostile relations with NGOs has led US-based firms to favor the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

This investigation of accounting standard setting as a case of business power in global governance links together three facets of power. First we examine the discursive power of international accounting standards in the ongoing process of financialization, which we break into two dynamics centered on profit and control. We argue that the selection of accounting paradigms does not concern measurement accuracy but is rather a choice of perspectives between finance and production when presenting economic reality as numbers. Drawing on evidence from the contestation between Rhenish capitalism and the financial perspective, we then explain why, despite the overwhelming structural power of finance, instrumental power exercised in political lobbying over accounting standards can still have considerable success.

This paper investigates the creation and consequences of private regulation in global food governance. It points to the power to govern and the authority to govern as the two crucial conditions for the emergence and diffusion of private food regulation. More specifically, the paper argues that the power to govern is a function of the structural power of agrifood corporations, particularly retail food corporations in our case. The authority to govern is a function of the perceived legitimacy of retail food corporations as political actors. By linking power and authority to the material and ideational structures existing in the global political economy of food, this paper analyses the processes that serve to create, maintain and reproduce private regulation in food governance. With its analysis, the paper aims to contribute to the theoretical and empirical debates on private authority, private regulation and the challenges for sustainability in the global food system.

The literature on corporate political influence has primarily focused on expenditures made by corporations and their PACs but has largely ignored the political activities of the individuals who lead these firms. To better understand the role of corporate elites in political advocacy, I introduce a new database of campaign contributions made by corporate directors and executives of Fortune 500 firms. Donating to political campaigns is nearly universal among corporate elites. When compared to corporate PACs, corporate elites are more ideological, more willing to support non-incumbents, and less likely to target powerful legislators. The results also reveal substantial heterogeneity in the political preferences of directors both across and within firms. In addition to challenging widely held beliefs about the political leanings of corporate elites, the prevalence of bipartisan boardrooms has important implications for how the preferences of key decision-makers within a firm shape its political activities.

The article takes a political economy perspective on the current harmonization of accounting standards. It argues that the process not only signals a major shift in the mode of governance (towards private authority), but also in the substance of what is being governed. In political-economic terms, the most significant change which the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) brings to accounting is an increased reliance on market values in the form of so-called Fair Value Accounting (FVA). The FVA paradigm represents a financial perspective on business operations. This perspective is matched by the process and structure of the institutions that govern international accounting standard setting, particularly the IASB and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group which advises the Commission of the European Union on the adoption of IASB standards. A network analysis of the different committees and working groups of these two institutions demonstrates that financial sector actors wield substantially more influence than other categories of business actors within the governance of international accounting standard setting.

The introduction to the special issue develops a systematic and theoretically grounded framework for assessing business power in global governance. It is shown that power is said to have shifted from the world of states to the world of business. However, in order to evaluate such a claim first a differentiation of power in its instrumental, structural, and discursive facets is necessary. It is furthermore explained that the strength of such a three-dimensional assessment is that it combines different levels of analysis and considers actor-specific and structural dimensions and their material and ideational sources. Following a short introduction to the more empirical articles is provided summarizing their commonalities and differences.