Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

This paper shows that the traditional New Institutional argument can be inverted. The specificity and the monitoring characteristics of the resources (agency cost characteristics of resources) influence property rights and organizational form but, in a world of positive transaction costs, also...