The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock...

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...

Most large UK private-sector organizations 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...

This essay argues that the Enron affair has been misunderstood as a failure of monitoring, with adverse consequences for the drafting of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Higgs report. Where Enron's board failed was in underestimating the risks that were inherent in the company's business plan and...

[enter Abstract Body]We use data from REPONSE 2004 and WERS 2004 to analyze whetherapproaches to HRM differ according to whether an establishment is part of a company with a stock exchange listing. In both countries we find that listing is positively associated with team working and...

“Comparative law and finance” quantifies differences in the laws governing the business enterprise in various countries. The resulting data can be used to test which legal institutions (if any) matter for financial development. Until recently only cross-sectional data were available. We...

The paper uses recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 28 developed and emerging economies to test whether the strengthening of share-holder rights in the course of the mid-1990s and 2000s promoted stock market development in those countries. It finds only weak...

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...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates from inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the...

This paper review empirical studies examining the economic effects of laws governing the formation, financing and organisation of business firms with the aim of putting the UK experience in a comparative perspective. The literature identifies two models of legal support for manufacturing which...