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Type	Working Paper
Scope	Discipline-based scholarship
Title	The Corporate Governance of Benedictine Abbeys: What can Stock Corporations Learn from Monasteries?
Organization Unit	Theory of Economic Policy and Non-Market Economics (Bruno Frey) Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm (Andreas Scherer)
Authors	Katja Rost Emil Inauen Margit Osterloh Bruno Frey
Language	English
Institution	University of Zurich
Series Name	Working paper series / Institute for Empirical Research in Economics
Number	No. 374
ISSN	1424-0459
Date	2008
Abstract Text	The corporate governance structure of monasteries is analyzed to derive new insights into solving agency problems of modern corporations. In the long history of monasteries, some abbots and monks lined their own pockets and monasteries were undisciplined. Monasteries developed special systems to check these excesses and therefore were able to survive for centuries. These features are studied from an economic perspective. Benedictine monasteries in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and German speaking Switzerland have an average lifetime of almost 500 years and only a quarter of them broke up as a result of agency problems. We argue that this is due to an appropriate governance structure, relying strongly on the intrinsic motivation of the members and on internal control mechanisms.
Official URL	http://www.econ.uzh.ch/wp.html
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