During his tenure as dean, he oversaw the development of the management school and recruited several noteworthy economists including Michael Jensen and doctoral student Kenneth French.
In 1949, Meckling enrolled at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and various members of the Cowles Commission, but did not receive a PhD.
At RAND, Meckling frequently collaborated with Alchian, Ronald Coase, Burton Klein, and Andrew Marshall (foreign policy strategist).
[8] In 1973, Karl Brunner, a European economist on the faculty at Rochester, approached Meckling and Jensen about participating in an economic conference series he organized in Interlaken.
Brunner, Meckling and Jensen began to organize a paper around Milton Friedman's recently published "The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" opinion article in the New York Times.
Jensen and Meckling would spend the next year refining the paper as they found holes in the view of a firm as a profit-maximizing entity.
They were not the first to focus on this topic, which had been previously addressed by, among others, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in their 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
The paper also posits that investors will understand the effect of incentives, and will be willing to pay more for shares when they expect that management is more inclined to maximize shareholder value.
[8] In addition to this, he worked as the executive director of President Nixon's "Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force",[12] using his connections at the CNA to secure some of the data used in the final report.