In a painstaking analysis, Roe (law, Harvard Law School) examines the impact of a nation's strong social policies on the corporate governance, suggesting that stronger social policies can cause an American style of diffuse ownership among shareholders to fail. The link between social policies and corporate governance is examined statistically for a large number of countries, and in case studies for seven: Italy, Germany, Sweden, the UK, France, Japan, and the US. Product markets, securities markets, and the ability of corporate and economic structures to induce a political backlash are discussed. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs sharply from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another.

Corporate law and corporate governance have been at the forefront of regulatory activities across the world for several decades now, and are subject to increasing public attention following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance provides the global framework necessary to understand the aims and methods of legal research in this field. Written by leading scholars from around the world, the Handbook contains a rich variety of chapters that provide a comparative and functional overview of corporate governance. It opens with the central theoretical approaches and methodologies in corporate law scholarship in Part I, before examining core substantive topics in corporate law, including shareholder rights, takeovers and restructuring, and minority rights in Part II. Part III focuses on new challenges in the field, including conflicts between Western and Asian corporate governance environments, the rise of foreign ownership, and emerging markets. Enforcement issues are covered in Part IV, and Part V takes a broader approach, examining those areas of law and finance that are interwoven with corporate governance, including insolvency, taxation, and securities law as well as financial regulation. The Handbook is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource placing corporate law and governance in its wider context, and is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the field.

For many Americans, capitalism is a dynamic engine of prosperity that rewards the bold, the daring, and the hardworking. But to many outside the United States, capitalism seems like an initiative that serves only to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few hereditary oligarchies. As A History of Corporate Governance around the World shows, neither conception is wrong. In this volume, some of the brightest minds in the field of economics present new empirical research that suggests that each side of the debate has something to offer the other. Free enterprise and well-developed financial systems are proven to produce growth in those countries that have them. But research also suggests that in some other capitalist countries, arrangements truly do concentrate corporate ownership in the hands of a few wealthy families. A History of Corporate Governance around the World provides historical studies of the patterns of corporate governance in several countries-including the large industrial economies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States; larger developing economies like China and India; and alternative models like those of the Netherlands and Sweden.

The business corporation is one of the greatest organizational inventions, but it creates risks both for shareholders and for third parties. To mitigate these risks, legislators, judges, and corporate lawyers have tried to learn from foreign experiences and adapt their regulatory regimes to them. In the last three decades, this approach has led to a stream of corporate and capital market law reforms unseen before. Corporate governance, the system by which companies are directed and controlled, is today a key topic for legislation, practice, and academia all over the world. Corporate scandals and financial crises have repeatedly highlighted the need to better understand the economic, social, political, and legal determinants of corporate governance in individual countries. Comparative Corporate Governance furthers this goal by bringing together current scholarship in law and economics with the expertise of local corporate governance specialists from twenty-three countries.

This book investigates the key factors shaping corporate governance in China and presents a sophisticated study of corporate governance in China from a comparative and historical perspective. Drawing on extensive corporate governance literature, this book articulates why path dependence theory is the most effective framework for interpreting the development path of Chinese corporate governance. Chenxia Shi reviews the historical role of government in commercial development and regulation in dynastic China and in early corporate law-making, followed by an account of China’s legal and economic development over the last three decades. This historical inquiry identifies government control as the key feature of economic and market regulation in China. In particular, this book canvasses the evolution of governance of State-Owned Enterprises and listed companies, major corporate governance problems, regulatory challenges posed by China’s increasing participation in economic globalization, and enforcement difficulties particularly in relation to investor protection, directors’ duties and accountability. Ultimately, Political Determinants of Corporate Governance in China demonstrates that corporate governance in China is largely determined by political imperatives and those political imperatives have been shaped and re-shaped in a historical process.

We have long been told that corporations rule the world, their interests seemingly taking precedence over states and their citizens. Yet, while states, civil society, and international organizations are well drawn in terms of their institutions, ideologies, and functions, the world's global corporations are often more simply sketched as mechanisms of profit maximization. In this book, John Mikler re-casts global corporations as political actors with complex identities and strategies. Debunking the idea of global corporations as exclusively profit-driven entities, he shows how they seek not only to drive or modify the agendas of states but to govern in their own right. He also explains why we need to re-territorialize global corporations as political actors that reflect and project the political power of the states and regions from which they hail. We know the global corporations' names, we know where they are headquartered, and we know where they invest and operate. Economic processes are increasingly produced by the control they possess, the relationships they have, the leverage they employ, the strategic decisions they make, and the discourses they create to enhance acceptance of their interests. This book represents a call to study how they do so, rather than making assumptions based on theoretical abstractions.

"This book investigates the impact of diverse cultures on the development and actualization of global economic entities, exploring advanced methods and best practices for the effective utilization and management of financial organizations within a globalized political context"--Provided by publisher.

Takes readers through an in-depth examination of many leading industrialized nations and identifies both the drivers that propel corporations towards convergence and the major impediments that stand in the way of convergence. Also examines many mechanisms of convergence such as governance codes, MNCs, and IPOs.

The corporate governance systems of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States are often characterized as a single 'Anglo-American' system prioritizing shareholders' interests over those of other corporate stakeholders. Such generalizations, however, obscure substantial differences across the common-law world. Contrary to popular belief, shareholders in the United Kingdom and jurisdictions following its lead are far more powerful and central to the aims of the corporation than are shareholders in the United States. This book presents a new comparative theory to explain this divergence and explores the theory's ramifications for law and public policy. Bruner argues that regulatory structures affecting other stakeholders' interests - notably differing degrees of social welfare protection for employees - have decisively impacted the degree of political opposition to shareholder-centric policies across the common-law world. These dynamics remain powerful forces today, and understanding them will be vital as post-crisis reforms continue to take shape.