Stable rank of corner rings

B. Blackadar recently proved that any full corner in a unital C*-algebra has K-theoretic stable rank greater than or equal to the stable rank of . (Here is a projection in , and fullness means that .) This result is extended to arbitrary (unital) rings in the present paper: If is a full idempotent in , then . The proofs rely partly on algebraic analogs of Blackadar's methods and partly on a new technique for reducing problems of higher stable rank to a concept of stable rank one for skew (rectangular) corners . The main result yields estimates relating stable ranks of Morita equivalent rings. In particular, if where is a finitely generated projective generator, and can be generated by elements, then .