Comparative Corporate Governance

This research handbook provides a state-of-the-art perspective on how corporate governance differs between countries around the world. It covers highly topical issues including corporate purpose, corporate social responsibility and shareholder activism.

"This book goes back to a symposium held at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign Private and Private International Law in Hamburg on May 15-17 1997"--P. [v].

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.

Comparative Corporate Governance considers the effects of globalization on corporate governance issues and highlights how, despite these widespread consequences, predictions of legal convergence have not come true. By adopting a comparative legal approach, this book explores the disparity between convergence attempts and the persistence of local models of governance in the US, Europe and Asia.

Corporate governance is on the reform agenda all over the world. How will global economic integration affect the different systems of corporate ownership and governance? Is the Anglo-American model of shareholder capitalism destined to become the template for a converging global corporate governance standard or will the differences persist? This reader contains classic work from leading scholars addressing this question as well as several new essays. In a sophisticated political economy analysis that is also attuned to the legal framework, the authors bring to bear efficiency arguments, politics, institutional economics, international relations, industrial organization, and property rights. These questions have become even more important in light of the post-Enron corporate governance crisis in the United States and the European Union's repeated efforts at corporate integration. This will become a key text for postgraduates and academics.

An analytical overview of the regulation of shareholder activism in the UK and Germany. The book shows how the comparative legal method can be used in the study of the corporate governance systems of different countries. It deals with the regulation of the governance of listed companies within a wide framework that recognises the importance of company law, securities markets law, standards and internal rule-making.

Corporate law and governance are at the forefront of regulatory activities worldwide, and subject to increasing public attention in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Comprehensively referencing the key debates, the Handbook provides a much-needed framework for understanding the aims and methods of legal research in the field.

New trends are emerging regarding earnings management and corporate governance showing similarities and striking differences in the practices of different countries and economies. These new trends currently shape the field of modern corporate governance with crucial issues being looked at in governance law and practices, accounting systems, earnings quality and management, stakeholder involvement, and more. In order to advance these new avenues in corporate governance, research looks at accounting policies firms use in different opportunistic circumstances in order to manage earnings, the corporate governance practices in different countries, firm performance, and other dimensions of companies. The understanding of these topics is beneficial in understanding the current state of different types of firms and their practices in modern times. Comparative Research on Earnings Management, Corporate Governance, and Economic Value is focused on the investigation of key challenges and perspectives of corporate governance and earnings management and outlines possible scenarios of its development. The chapters explore this new avenue of research and cover theoretical, empirical, and experimental studies related to different themes in the global context of earnings management and corporate governance. This book is ideal for economists, businesses, managers, accountants, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students who are interested in the current issues and advancements in corporate governance and earnings management.

The analysis is notable for its insistence that, for a corporate governance system to work, the principles and practicalities of that system must be derived from customary cultural norms. Experience shows that imported models, although they may be enshrined in law, lead to economic stagnation unless actual practice is monitored and reformed and the laws change to reflect these necessary adjustments. Thus the model proposed here begins with the Company Law of 1994, and proceeds to show how practical experience is already providing valuable data for the task of improving the law.

This book takes a comparative law and economics approach to the study of corporate governance. It looks at the overall impact of corporate law on separation of ownership and control across different jurisdictions and in doing so reappraises the existing framework for economic analysis of corporate law.