This article outlines the development of English company law in the four centuries before 1900. The main focus is on the evolution of the corporate form and the five key legal characteristics of the corporation - separate legal personality, limited liability, transferable joint stock, delegated...

What legal, political and economic institutions are shaping privatisations processes in the world? This paper addresses the issue presenting new evidence for a sample of 49 countries. From an empirical analysis for the period 1977-1996, the decision to privatise appears to be related to...

The paper analyses a strategy for avoiding the disclosure of the financial statements of a limited partnership with a limited liability company as general partner (GmbH & Co. KG) according to German Commercial Code (HGB). It describes the formal process of the joining of a natural person as an...

Recent ”law and finance” research implies that minority shareholder rights are heavily affected by the legal tradition. This in turn has economic implications for a company´s ability to raise equity capital from outsiders, i.e., from minority investors. In a famous study by La Porta et al....

In the past only a few of the major Italian companies spontaneously adopted self- regulatory tools such as codes of corporate conduct or codes of ethics, claiming the set of values that should guide their conduct and their shareholders and stakeholders were called to comply with. As a reaction...

How do barely incentivized norms impact incentive-rich environments? We take social enterprise legislation as a case in point. It establishes rules on behalf of constituencies that have no institutionalized means of enforcing them. By relying primarily on managers' other-regarding concerns...

This paper investigates the implications of the fair value protections contemplated by the standard corporate contract (i.e., the standard contract form for which corporate law provides) for the entrepreneur-venture capitalist relationship, focusing, in particular, on unavoidable...

We analyse the relationship between the distribution of ownership and the allocation of control in Danish closely held corporations. First, we investigate why firms have boards. Second, we identify relationships between owners, boardmembers and CEOs in these firms. Third, we show the presence of...

This study is an exploratory analysis of the economic role of banks under different prudential frameworks. It considers an agent-based computational model populated by consumers, firms, banks, and a central bank whose out-of-equilibrium interactions replicate the conjunct dynamics of a banking...

This paper reviews the literature on the finance-growth nexus within a neoclassical growth framework, placing an emphasis on the policy implications in the current European environment, that has placed financial reforms high on the policy Agenda. While more research is needed to establish...