Bryce Tingle - How Are Regulations Damaging Markets?

In this episode of The Curious Task, host Alex Aragona speaks with Bryce Tingle, N. Murray Edwards Chair in Business Law at the University of Calgary, about the unintended consequences of corporate governance regulations. Tingle argues that over the past 40 years, corporate law has become overly focused on minimizing agency costs—specifically, the separation between shareholders and management—rather than on the central role of markets in driving innovation, efficiency, and social cohesion. He traces this shift to the influential 1976 Jensen and Meckling paper, which framed corporations as principal-agent relationships and led to decades of regulatory interventions, including the near-universal adoption of independent boards and strict governance rules. These changes, Tingle contends, have damaged the market for corporate governance by discouraging companies from going public, especially in Canada, where the number of public firms has nearly halved in two decades. This decline has serious economic consequences, including a scaling crisis that prevents Canadian startups from growing into major industries. Tingle also highlights the intrinsic moral and social value of markets—fostering trust, cooperation, and tolerance—which are undermined when regulation replaces market-driven experimentation and bargaining. The episode concludes with a call to return markets to the center of corporate law, emphasizing that regulation must serve market health, not replace it.