The process of liberalisation of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development both of its financial markets and the legal institutions which support these. An influential body of recent economic work asserts that a country's 'legal origin'-as a civilian or common law...

This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005 for four advanced countries, UK, France, Germany and the US. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis - whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

Over recent years, a number of regulators have launched proposals to expand the obligation to disclose major share ownership in listed companies. This article shows that these are not stand-alone developments. Using a unique dataset comprising data from 25 countries over 11 years (1995-2005) and...

More than fifty years before the debate about the contractibility of corporate law in the United States, English and then Australian lawmakers truncated what had been substantial scope for contracting around directors' duties. Legislation imposed mandatory rules concerning conflicts of interest...

The limited liability partnership has been heralded as a cost-effective way of doing business for professional firms that seek to reduce the personal liability risk of partners who are not directly involved in negligent acts or wrongdoing. The LLP business form has been adopted by all US states...

The corporate governance environment in the UK and US is generally thought to be hostile to the emergence of cooperative employment relations of the kind exemplified by labour-management partnerships. We discuss case study evidence from the UK which suggests that, contrary to this widespread...

Most large UK private-sector organisations are listed companies that are subject to intense pressures to enhance shareholder value. The question arises of whether this constrains the ability of UK managers to pursue genuine partnership arrangements with long-term stakeholders, including...

The current financial crisis has given rise to calls to toughen considerably the codes of corporate governance put in place in many countries to regulate corporate behaviour (e.g. the UK Combined Code). These codes vary slightly in form but tend to contain a mix of non-discretionary regulations...

It is argued here that - contrary to current conventional wisdom - an active market for corporate control is not an essential ingredient of either company law reform or financial and economic development. The absence of such a market in coordinated market systems during their modern economic...

The Slovenian Corporate Governance Code for Public Joint-Stock Companies was adopted in March 2004. Using a systems-theoretical approach, we examine the extent to which the implementation of the Code has resulted in the kinds of 'reflexive' learning processes which the 'comply or explain'...