Hostile takeovers are commonly thought to play a key role in rendering managers accountable to dispersed shareholders in the Anglo-American system of corporate governance. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the very significant differences in takeover regulation between the two...

How persistent are the effects of legal institutions adopted or inherited in the distant past? A substantial literature argues that legal origins have persistent effects that explain clear differences in investor protections and financial development around the world today (La Porta et al, 1998,...

Does a legal tradition adopted in the distant past constrain a country's ability to provide the protection that investors need for financial markets to develop? This paper contributes to the literature that studies the connection between law and finance by looking at the relationship between...

This paper, which will be the basis for a chapter in the forthcoming OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CORPORATE LAW AND GOVERNANCE (Jeffrey Gordon and Georg Ringe, eds.), surveys the extent of convergence in corporate law and governance over the past 15 years. The paper assesses the efforts to measure...

This paper, which will be the basis for a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance (Jeffrey Gordon and Georg Ringe, eds.), surveys the extent of convergence in corporate law and governance over the past 15 years. The paper assesses the efforts to measure...

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre-empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent...

Are regulatory interventions delayed reactions to market failures or can regulators proactively pre‐empt corporate misbehavior? From a public interest view, we would expect “effective” regulation to ex ante mitigate agency conflicts between corporate insiders and outsiders, and prevent...

La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny's (LLSV) purported demonstration in Law and Finance (1998) of a correlation between the legal origins of a country and its stock market development and ownership dispersion, mediated through the protection of minority shareholders as against...

Much has been written about the current crisis in the global financial system, and many thoughtful analyses have examined the causes and consequences of that crisis. This paper joins those analyses that argue that the crisis reveals flaws in the theoretical underpinnings of capital market...

This article discusses the unitended effects of increased anti-corruption enforcement by the United States Department of Justice and the Securities & Exchange Commission. With the emergence of other maturing economies, the United States can no longer assume that most companies will tolerate its...