Nations opened local stock exchanges at a rapid pace during the late 1980s and 1990s, creating a channel for investment capital from wealthy industrial nations to "emerging markets" as well as a mechanism for institutional change in local economies. This study examines the local and global...

We examine the antecedents and consequences in developing countries of creating a national stock exchange, a core technology of financial globalization. We study local conditions and global institutional pressures in the rapid spread of exchanges since the 1980s and examine how conditions at the...

This paper analyzes conflicts of interest in proxy voting by mutual funds using newly-available data on funds' voting records for 2004. We first examine mutual funds' ties to corporate clients created via pension fund business and their patterns of portfolio ownership. We then link these to...

We examine the governance practices, ownership structures, and analyst followings of US-listed firms from the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Chile, and Israel, and find little evidence of convergence toward a US model of corporate governance. In the size of their boards, the proportion of inside...

Corporate governance describes the structures, processes, and institutions within and around organizations that allocate power and resource control among participants. Law and economics scholars have developed a view of the public corporation as a nexus-of-contracts whose structure is driven by...

This paper examines how the place of banks in the intercorporate network has changed as a result of their decreasing role as financial intermediaries in the U.S. economy. An analysis of comprehensive data on the boards of the fifty largest banks and their connections with the several hundred...

This paper analyzes the relations among bank mergers, changes in boards and their networks, and changes in the global footprint of merging banks. We examine all mergers involving U.S. banks with foreign branches between 1986 and 2004. We find that while the largest banks have become even larger...

U.S. corporations shared members of their boards of directors since the early 1900s, creating a dense interlock network in which nearly every major corporation was connected through short paths, and elevating a handful of well-connected directors to an influential “inner circle.” This...

Financialization refers to the increasing importance of finance, financial markets, and financial institutions to the workings of the economy. This article reviews evidence on the causes and consequences of financialization in the United States and around the world, with particular attention to...