I analyze the current prevalence of the concept of shareholder value maximization in Brazil from the normative, case law, and managerial perspectives. On the normative aspect, I show that Brazilian corporate law is much closer to a balanced and socially oriented perspective for the role of...

Governance at banks, especially major banks, requires further reform, especially with respect to incentives. Supervisors are concerned that incentives may make executives prone to take “excessive” risks. Shareholders are concerned that banks rarely earn their cost of capital.What's needed is...

By the end of the twentieth century, the then-dominant literature on “law and finance” assumed that concentrated ownership was a product of deficient legal systems that did not sufficiently protect outside investors. At the same time, commentators posited that the competitive pressures of...

Crowdfunding, a new Internet-based securities market, was recently authorized by federal and state law in order to create a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive system of entrepreneurial finance. But will people really send their money to strangers on the Internet in exchange for unregistered...

While it seems that China's corporate system lags far behind that of Western developed countries such as the UK, the US or Germany, as early as 1904 China's first corporate law had been promulgated by the imperial government—the Qing Government—which included the rule of limited liability...

This article, written for a symposium on the history of corporate social responsibility, seeks to make sense of the surprising disagreement within the corporate law academy on the foundational legal question of corporate purpose: does the law require shareholder primacy or not? I argue here that...

The global financial crisis of 2007-8 gave definitive light to some worrying cracks that for years have plagued the global economy. In the UK, the remedy to the planetary collapse took the form of the stewardship code, issued in 2010 by the Financial Reporting Council. This initiative, as the...

Horizontal shareholdings exist when a common set of investors own significant shares in corporations that are horizontal competitors in a product market. Economic models show that substantial horizontal shareholdings are likely to anticompetitively raise prices when the owned businesses compete...