SAFE Research Affiliate and LawFin Postdoctoral Researcher Fatjon Kaja has been awarded the GLEA Young Scholar Prize for his working paper “The Asking Price of Incorporation: State Leverage and the Evolution of Corporate Purpose” at the annual conference (16-17 July 2026) of the German Law and Economics Association. The prize is awarded for an outstanding contribution from an emerging scholar in the field of law and economics.
What history reveals about corporate purpose
Drawing on a novel dataset of 260 royal charters from the United Kingdom and combining historical analysis, text mining, and machine-learning techniques, Kaja revisits the origins of corporate purpose. He argues that corporate purpose was historically not primarily a question of serving shareholders or broader stakeholder groups. Instead, it partly reflected the “asking price” firms paid for access to the privileges of incorporation, with companies gaining the corporate form only in exchange for specific and enforceable public obligations.
The paper further suggests that the weakening of corporate purpose over time is closely linked to the liberalization of the incorporation process. For contemporary debates, the paper shows that corporate purpose cannot be fully understood apart from the legal and institutional conditions governing access to the corporate form. This historical perspective challenges approaches that focus primarily on redefining corporate purpose through broader purpose statements or new corporate structures.
About Fatjon Kaja
Fatjon Kaja is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies on the Foundations of Law and Finance at Goethe University Frankfurt and a Research Affiliate at SAFE. He received his PhD in Law and Finance from the University of Amsterdam in 2026. His academic background further includes a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Minnesota Law School and both a Master’s degree in Financial Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Pre-Law, Philosophy, and Economics from The City College of New York (CUNY). Before completing his doctoral studies, he worked as a Judicial Law Clerk at the Supreme Court of the Republic of Palau. His research interests lie at the intersection of corporate purpose, sustainable corporate governance, and the efficiency of financial markets.
