Essays in law and finance

Why does corporate purpose appear binding and consequential in some legal and historical settings, yet remains largely aspirational in modern corporate law? This dissertation argues that the answer lies not in the ethical resolve of corporations or the normative preferences of their managers, but in the legal and institutional arrangements that govern access to the corporate form.
Drawing on a mixed-methods law and finance approach, the dissertation examines how incorporation rules shape the meaning, enforceability, and economic relevance of corporate purpose over time. Chapter 1 reconstructs the historical foundations of corporate purpose under the UK royal charter system, demonstrating that purpose was once explicitly enumerated and enforced through mechanisms such as quo warranto and scire facias. Chapter 2 constructs and analyzes the first comprehensive dataset of UK royal charters (1155–2025), employing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and a random forest classifier to show that the erosion of enforceable, public-oriented purpose clauses was the structural consequence of declining state leverage during the incorporation process, rather than a product of changing drafting norms or ideology. Chapter 3 employs a decision-tree framework to explain why, in the absence of enforceable legal constraints, rational corporations face strong incentives to avoid binding commitments to purpose. Chapter 4 tests these theoretical claims empirically through an event study of corporations in the global arms industry, comparing market reactions to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, revealing that non-binding purpose commitments are systematically abandoned when geopolitical conditions shift.
Taken together, the essays reframe persistent dissatisfaction with contemporary corporate purpose not as a failure of corporate ethics, but as the consequence of institutional evolution that has weakened the conditions under which the corporate form is granted.