The article analyses the interplay between agency problems at various stages in the parliamentary chain of delegation and external constraints related to corporatist negotiations in Norwegian agricultural policymaking. The combination of minority government and MPs tending to have more extreme preferences than the voters, and corporatist integration of specialized interests, may lead to an accumulation of agency costs. However, the study shows that we need to specify carefully the conditions under which this will occur. The article is based on official policy documents and a survey of citizens.

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.

Current reform concerning directors’ remuneration relies on improving legal rules and self-regulation to minimise expropriation of minority shareholders. These have prominently focussed on empowering shareholders. Nonetheless, it is unclear as to the extent these reform proposals are compatible within the concentrated shareholding structure. Some of the reforms taking place in developed countries are suited for dispersed shareholding structure and thus transplanting them to emerging economies with concentrated shareholders may be ineffective. Malaysia poses an interesting case study, especially to countries with similar ownership structure as the concentrated shareholding structure raises different agency problems. The issue of protection of minority shareholder rights and the prevention of abuse of the controlling power by paying excessive remuneration to the executives is therefore a subject of due consideration in Malaysia and countries with similar shareholding structures. This article recommends that Malaysia and other emerging countries look into encouraging limited shareholder empowerment in tandem with laws.

This article deals with the exclusion of non-profit-making entities from the right of freedom of establishment of Articles 49 and 54 TFEU. It analyses the historical reasons for this exclusion. It is argued that the exclusion from freedom of establishment is no longer justified on the basis of two elements. Firstly, the development of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice in the fields of competition law, free movement of capital and tax law makes such exclusion systematically no longer tenable. Secondly, a law and economics treatment of non-profit firms as organisations that efficiently provide services in alternative to for-profit firms weakens the reasons for the exclusion. The article proposes a uniform, European notion of non-profit entity based on a law and economics analysis of this type of firm for the purposes of Article 54 TFEU as opposed to possible different national notions. This is followed by a brief analysis of the hypothesis of regulatory competition among jurisdictions for the law regulating the corporate governance of non-profit entities.