Good Company

“Palladino explores how ending shareholder primacy and reorienting corporate decision-making toward productivity would work in practice, focusing on how board members, employees, managers, shareholders, customers, and the broader public would understand their rights and responsibilities if they were operating together in pursuit of economic innovation.” * Journal of Economic Literature *“Palladino has written a tour-de-force on the history, politics, and policy of corporations and capitalism. Palladino shows that we can have a more innovative, dynamic economy. Too many companies have become financialized engines in thrall to shareholders. Palladino’s book is a roadmap towards companies that produce real, useful goods and services for all of us, as stakeholders.” – Felicia Wong | Roosevelt Institute“For two generations, the idea that corporations exist to create shareholder value has been the North Star for American business. As Good Company posits, this has created disastrous consequences: increased inequality, concentrated economic power, lower resiliency, and a hollowing of innovative enterprise. Palladino proposes tested policies—such as federal incorporation or increased worker ownership and representation on corporate boards—that can restore the public corporation as an engine of opportunity and innovation.” – Jerry Davis | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor“Good Company offers new ways of thinking about corporations, the core of capitalism. The book is a head-on challenge to the myth that what’s best for corporate shareholders is best for the rest of us and even for companies. Palladino considers public policies to make companies more innovative and equitable, including changes in tax law, fiduciary rules, corporate boards, and the process for distributing corporate wealth. Good Company is incisive and much needed.” – Sanford M. Jacoby | University of California, Los Angeles

Lenore Palladino is assistant professor of economics and public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, and research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute.