In this major reinterpretation of the evolution of the American corporation, Mark Roe convincingly demonstrates that the ownership structure of large U.S. firms owes its distinctive character as much to politics as to economics and technology. His provocative examination addresses essential issues facing American businesses today as they compete in the new international marketplace.
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).
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.
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.
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 behavior of managers-such as the rewards they obtain for poor performance, the role of boards of directors in monitoring managers, and the regulatory framework covering the corporate governance mechanisms that are put in place to ensure managers' accountability to shareholder and other stakeholders-has been the subject of extensive media and policy scrutiny in light of the financial crisis of the early 2000s. However, corporate governance covers a much broader set of issues, which requires detailed assessment as a central issue of concern to business and society. Critiques of traditional governance research based on agency theory have noted its "under-contextualized" nature and its inability to compare accurately and explain the diversity of corporate governance arrangements across different institutional contexts. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Governance aims at closing these theoretical and empirical gaps. It considers corporate governance issues at multiple levels of analysis-the individual manager, firms, institutions, industries, and nations-and presents international evidence to reflect the wide variety of perspectives. In analyzing the effects of corporate governance on performance, a variety of indicators are considered, such as accounting profit, economic profit, productivity growth, market share, proxies for environmental and social performance, such as diversity and other aspects of corporate social responsibility, and of course, share price effects. In addition to providing a high level review and analysis of the existing literature, each chapter develops an agenda for further research on a specific aspect of corporate governance. This Handbook constitutes the definitive source of academic research on corporate governance, synthesizing studies from economics, strategy, international business, organizational behavior, entrepreneurship, business ethics, accounting, finance, and law.
"Magnificent."—The Economist From the Nobel Prize–winning economist, a groundbreaking and comprehensive account of corporate finance Recent decades have seen great theoretical and empirical advances in the field of corporate finance. Whereas once the subject addressed mainly the financing of corporations—equity, debt, and valuation—today it also embraces crucial issues of governance, liquidity, risk management, relationships between banks and corporations, and the macroeconomic impact of corporations. However, this progress has left in its wake a jumbled array of concepts and models that students are often hard put to make sense of. Here, one of the world's leading economists offers a lucid, unified, and comprehensive introduction to modern corporate finance theory. Jean Tirole builds his landmark book around a single model, using an incentive or contract theory approach. Filling a major gap in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance is an indispensable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as researchers of corporate finance, industrial organization, political economy, development, and macroeconomics. Tirole conveys the organizing principles that structure the analysis of today's key management and public policy issues, such as the reform of corporate governance and auditing; the role of private equity, financial markets, and takeovers; the efficient determination of leverage, dividends, liquidity, and risk management; and the design of managerial incentive packages. He weaves empirical studies into the book's theoretical analysis. And he places the corporation in its broader environment, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, and examines the two-way interaction between the corporate environment and institutions. Setting a new milestone in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance will be the authoritative text for years to come.
Experts from economics, finance, law, policy, and banking discuss the design and implementation of a future capital market union in Europe. The plan for further development of Europe's economic and monetary union foresees the creation of a capital market union (CMU)—a single market for capital in the entire Eurozone. The need for citizens and firms of all European countries to have access to funding, together with the pressure to improve the efficiency and risk-sharing opportunities of the financial system in general, put the CMU among the top priorities on the Eurozone's agenda. In this volume, leading academics in economics, finance, and law, along with policy makers and practitioners, discuss the design and implementation of a future CMU. Contributors describe the key design challenges of the CMU; specific opportunities and obstacles for reaching the CMU's goals of increasing the economic well-being of households and the profitability and viability of firms; the role that markets—from the latest fintech developments to traditional equity markets—can play in the future success of CMU; and the institutional framework needed for CMU in the aftermath of the global recession. Contributors Sumit Agarwal, Franklin Allen, Valentina Allotti, Gene Amromin, John Armour, Geert Bekaert, Itzhak Ben-David, Marcello Bianchi, Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, Claudio Borio, Franziska Bremus, Marina Brogi, Claudia M. Buch, Giacomo Calzolari, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Luca Enriques, Douglas D. Evanoff, Ester Faia, Eilis Ferran, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Michael Haliassos, Campbell R. Harvey, Kathryn Judge, Suzanne Kalss, Valentina Lagasio, Katya Langenbucher, Christian T. Lundblad, Massimo Marchesi, Alexander Michaelides, Stefano Micossi, Emanuel Moench, Mario Nava, Giorgio Barba Navaretti, Giovanna Nicodano, Gianmarco Ottaviano, Marco Pagano, Monica Paiella, Lubos Pastor, Alain Pietrancosta, Richard Portes, Alberto Franco Pozzolo, Stephan Siegel, Wolfe-Georg Ringe, Diego Valiante
