The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate.

Ronald Coase, in his classic 1937 paper on 'The Nature of the Firm,' was the first to bring the concept of transaction costs to bear on the study of firm and market organization.

The organization of the government itself is something which we ought to examine in a more self-conscious way - the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The mission that each of them has is mainly economic but should be informed by good organizational practices.

The mining companies in Zimbabwe are not large enough to expand production facilities or finance green-field projects from their cash-flows.

Managerial discretion can take many forms, some very subtle. Individual managers may run slack operations; they may pursue subgoals that are at variance with corporate purposes; they can engage in self-dealing.

The remediableness criterion is an effort to deal symmetrically with real world institutions, both public and private, warts and all. The criterion is this: an extant mode of organization for which no superior feasible form of organization can be described and implemented with expected net gains is presumed to be efficient.