In every developed market economy, the law provides for a set of standard form legal entities. In the United States, these entities include, among others, the business corporation, the cooperative corporation, the nonprofit corporation, the municipal corporation, the limited liability company,...

This paper examines common arrangements for separating control from cash flow rights: stock pyramids, cross-ownership structures, and dual class equity structures. We describe the ways in which such arrangements enable a controlling shareholder or group to maintain a complete lock on the control...

Numerous high profile cases across industries and jurisdictions, including Wells Fargo, Siemens, Volkswagen, BP or Google, indicate that legal compliance remains a significant corporate governance challenge around the world. Ever increasing fines have become the standard response to all types of...

In this chapter we analyze ancient Rome's law of business entities from the perspective of asset partitioning, by which we mean the delimiting of creditor collection rights based on the distinction between business assets and personal assets. Asset partitioning, which is an essential legal...

The centrality of the CEO is reflected in the empirical literature linking CEO turnover to poor firm performance. However, less is known about the institutional and personal correlates of CEO turnover. In this study, we find two CEO characteristics interact with turnover: tenure and ownership....

It is easy sport to criticize the Delaware takeover cases as inconsistent with the empirical evidence, each other, and a sensible allocation of power between managers and shareholders. We in fact believe all of these things. Here, however, we offer a more sympathetic account of the core Delaware...

In every developed market economy, the law provides for a set of standard form legal entities. In the United States, these entities include, among others, the business corporation, the cooperative corporation, the nonprofit corporation, the municipal corporation, the limited liability company,...

Despite the apparent divergence in institutions of governance, share ownership, capital markets, and business culture across developed economies, the basic law of the corporate form has already achieved a high degree of uniformity, and continued convergence is likely. A principal reason for...

This article is the first chapter of a book authored by R. Kraakman, P. Davies, H. Hansmann, G. Hertig, K. Hopt, H. Kanda, and E. Rock, quot;The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach,quot; (Oxford University Press 2004). The book as a whole provides a functional...