After a brief recent empirical sketch of Islamic finance, the paper turns to its main theoretical and conceptual purpose. It seeks to relate the concepts of Islamic and conventional finance, and to examine certain important questions which arise from the interaction between these systems. The...

In this paper we explore how social capital concepts can guide multinational firms’ decision making in developing countries. From a survey of recent research, we identify four types of social capital: institutional, relational, moral and spiritual. Because these capitals overlap and yet are...

Recent work in both the theory of the firm and of corporate law has called into question the appropriateness of analysing corporate law as ‘merely’ a set of standard form contracts. This article develops these ideas by focusing on property law’s role in underpinning corporate enterprise....

This paper offers a qualitative, case-study based analysis of hostile takeover bids mounted in the UK in the mid-1990s under the regime of the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers. It is shown that during bids, directors of bid targets focus on the concerns of target shareholders to the exclusion...

This paper contrasts 'economic' and 'organizational' approaches to corporate governance, in order to draw out some of their distinctive features and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses. Some promising areas of new research are identified which examine the role of social controls and...

In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach "public markets", similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be non-existent...

Empirical evidence shows that the second half of the 20th century has been characterised by a dramatic change in the evolutionary pattern of firms' size structure: the general tendency towards a growing importance of big business which marked the first phase of post-war development came to a...

Core institutions of UK corporate governance, in particular those relating to takeovers, board structure and directors’ duties, are strongly orientated towards a norm of shareholder primacy. Beyond the core, in particular at the intersection of insolvency and employment law, stakeholder...

The authors consider the theory and evidence on the propensity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to patent their innovations. Drawing on UK, European and US literature and data sources, they show that small firms are less likely to use patents as a means of protecting their investment...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is usually an area that does not lend itself easily to inter-company or cross-country analysis. This paper is an attempt to provide some metrics of multinational CSR drawing on the recent literature on social capital. We look at the self-reporting of social...