Origin of the enterprise

Author: Ding Donghong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: This work constructs a novel analytical framework for the nature of the firm, corporate growth, and institutional evolution from the perspectives of human capital, entrepreneurship, and enterprise contracts. It establishes an enterprise theory paradigm based on human capital as the theoretical foundation, entrepreneurship as the driver, and enterprise contracts as the core. The work also empirically studies four key aspects: the institutional architecture for the realization of heterogeneous human capital among entrepreneurs and its path for defining the property rights of incremental corporate assets, the institutional requirements for homogeneous human capital among employees and its coupling model with the property rights of existing assets, the institutional protection of physical capital property rights for capitalists and its path model for acquiring existing assets through incremental corporate assets, and the institutional characteristics of human capital property rights and their implications for reform paradigms. The main conclusions of this work are: human capital theft is a core factor in economic development and corporate growth; the firm is a multi-contract involving entrepreneurs (heterogeneous human capital), employees (homogeneous human capital), and capitalists (physical capital); the realization of human capital as physical capital is a fundamental process in capital development and corporate growth; defining the property rights of heterogeneous human capital among entrepreneurs through options, realizing the property rights of homogeneous human capital among employees through equity, and ensuring the property rights of physical capital for capitalists through individual property rights protection are the historical requirements and essential content of institutional evolution; the fundamental deficiency of state-owned enterprises lies in the asymmetry between human capital property rights and physical asset rights at both the starting and ending points of economic development, and the key to institutional evolution lies in the explicitation of enterprise human capital property rights while promoting the growth of entrepreneurs.