Types of Corporations: Formation, Financing, and Takeovers
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of modern corporations, drawing on legal definitions, statutory frameworks, and academic literature. It begins by defining the corporation as an artificial legal person and surveys the major types — including public, private, for-profit, non-profit, domestic, foreign, alien, publicly held, closely held, and subchapter S corporations — as well as the distinction between de jure and de facto corporations. The paper then outlines the general steps required to form a corporation, explains common corporate financing methods such as debt and equity securities, and describes the respective roles, duties, and rights of directors, officers, and shareholders. It concludes with an examination of corporate takeover strategies, including hostile takeovers, tender offers, exchange tender offers, and cash tender offers.
- Introduction: Scope and purpose of the paper
- Types of Corporations: Survey of all major corporation categories
- Forming a Corporation: Step-by-step corporate formation process
- Corporate Financing: Debt and equity securities as financing methods
- Roles, Duties, and Rights of Directors, Officers, and Shareholders: Legal rights and duties of corporate stakeholders
- Corporate Takeover Strategies: Hostile takeovers, tender offers, and exchange offers
- Conclusion: Summary of key findings on corporations
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses a clear, enumerated structure that guides the reader systematically through a complex legal and business topic, making it easy to follow even for readers unfamiliar with corporate law.
- It grounds abstract concepts — such as the corporation as an "artificial person" — in authoritative legal definitions (Black's Law Dictionary) and then immediately qualifies those definitions with scholarly commentary, demonstrating critical engagement with sources.
- The use of tabular summaries (Tables 1 and 2) efficiently organizes comparative information about corporation types and takeover strategies, reducing cognitive load while preserving analytical depth.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective synthesis of multiple source types — legal dictionaries, law review articles, business journals, and academic books — to build a unified, multi-dimensional explanation of a technical subject. By weaving citations from different disciplines into a coherent narrative, the writer shows how to use secondary sources not merely as decoration but as genuine evidence for each claim.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a classic expository structure: an introduction that maps the paper's scope, six thematic body sections (definition, types, formation, financing, rights of parties, and takeovers), and a conclusion that recaps every major finding. Each body section is self-contained but logically sequenced, moving from conceptual foundations to procedural details to stakeholder rights and finally to strategic corporate actions.
Introduction
The modern corporation has a lengthy history spanning four centuries, but this business model has expanded greatly to include a wide range of corporation types with fundamentally different ownership structures and goals (Rao 2). Given the global impact that corporations have on the economy today, it is important to gain a better understanding of corporations — most especially their similarities and differences and how these affect the manner in which they operate. To this end, this paper reviews the relevant literature concerning modern corporations to provide their background and an overview, a discussion of different types of corporations, and a description of how corporations are formed. A discussion of corporate financing practices is followed by a description of the respective roles, duties, and rights of directors, officers, and shareholders. Finally, a discussion of different types of corporate takeover strategies is followed by a summary of the research and its important findings in the conclusion.
Works Cited
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Rao, Venkatesh. "A Brief History of the Corporation." Ribbon Farm, 8 June 2011. Web.
Scholten, Ralph. "Investment Decisions and Managerial Discipline: Evidence from the Takeover Market." Financial Management 34.2 (2005): 35–41. Print.
Sridharan, Uma V., and Marc R. Reinganum. "Determinants of the Choice of the Hostile Takeover Mechanism: An Empirical Analysis of Tender Offers and Proxy Contests." Financial Management 24.1 (1993): 57–63. Print.
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Swanson, Zane, and Bin Srinidhi. The Capital Structure Paradigm: Evolution of Debt/Equity Choices. Westport, CT: Praeger. Print.
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