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...

The institutions of productive systems are structured by mutual interests and relative power. Securing mutually beneficial cooperation in production requires resolving distributional differences. These objectives are secured in liberal economic theory by the working of markets which mediate the...

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...

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 question we seek to address is: what effect has economic turbulence since 1985 had on three of the institutional foundations of post-war Japanese industrial success? First, we examine the Japanese 'main bank' system whereby a 'main' bank is involved in a special type of long-term...

This study combines the theories of international business and management with network theory in order to examines the networking activities of foreign affiliates. It focuses on a specific kind of network, which is taking place between firms based in geographic proximity. A comparative analysis...

A number of prominent publishers in the UK and US have become parts of globalized media groups. In Japan, by contrast, they have neither been absorbed into media groups nor become globalized businesses. Based on interviews of major players in the Japanese publishing industry as well as annual...

Prior to the industrial revolution, the predominant form of economic organization in western Europe and north America was the guild. Guilds were network forms, loose associations of independent producers, with strong local and regional identities, in which cooperation and competition were...

In this paper we examine the sourcing strategies of clothing firms in the developed economies of the UK and Germany in the context of their national institutional framework. We argue that, as a result of their embeddedness in divergent national structures, these firms pursue different sourcing...