This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Monday, September 10th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Elizabeth Warren has a new plan to shake up the boards of publicly traded firms.

It would involve giving employees whether they're shareholders or not the ability to name members of the company's board.

What would this mean for corporate governance and the flexibility of companies trying to respond to changing markets?

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson comments.

What is the core concern that Elizabeth Warren wants to address with her proposal

to essentially alter the composition of boards of large companies, and how does she go about it?

Warren is responding to several different critiques of the corporation

rather than a single one, and so her plan has a bunch of different planks which

relate sometimes only very loosely to each other. One of them is that businesses

are concerned with profit in the bottom line and reporting the Wall Street

and should be more responsive to stakeholders a term of art.

Another is that businesses get away with too much by shopping around among the 50 states

for corporate charters, Delaware most famously, and you could curtail them if you made the big

ones at least. Go to the federal government and have only one person to negotiate with or only one government to negotiate with.

Another part of it plays to the feeling that businesses have too much political power and would very sharply curtail their ability to participate in politics.

And yet another one, perhaps the biggest one, addresses the idea that the working class or the employed class in the US is not doing as

well as they should be out of the economy and so they need structural changes in order

to make the economy more rewarding for them through an

Americanized equivalent, in some ways going even further, of what's best known as co-determination, the German system

in which workers get seats on boards.

One of her problems appears to be that companies, large companies, may simply locate in one state and make choices about which state in which they will do business, make that their primary home, and she would prefer it if

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