New Books in Economics Donald Chew, "The Making of Modern Corporate Finance: A History of the Ideas and How They Help Build the Wealth of Nations" (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025)
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Feb 18, 2026 Donald H. Chew Jr., longtime editor and corporate finance scholar, traces the history of modern corporate finance and its key thinkers. He explores why US markets power growth, the rise and fall of conglomerates, activist investors and private equity, and tensions between short-term pressures and long-term investment. Conversations touch on leverage, governance differences across countries, and how investor quality shapes firm strategy.
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Corporate Finance As The Engine Of Productivity
- Corporate finance channels capital to promising technologies and away from failing ones, powering productivity and national wealth.
- Donald H. Chew Jr. calls it the visible hand of Schumpeterian creative destruction that built America’s growth sector.
GE’s Rise, Fall, And Restructuring
- General Electric under Jack Welch was a highly successful conglomerate that met quarterly earnings targets through financial engineering.
- Larry Culp later split GE into separate businesses and roughly doubled its market value, illustrating value from restructuring.
From Manager Rule To Active Investor Discipline
- Post-Depression regulation separated investors from management and produced manager-led conglomerates that later underperformed.
- Active investors and hostile takeovers restored investor discipline and triggered continuous restructuring since the 1980s.
