The global financial crisis of 2008 has stimulated the debate on corporate governance and shareholder protection. The intuitive reason for the topicality of shareholder protection is that insolvencies mainly harm shareholders as the companies' residual claimants. In addition, ideally,...

Is Chinese commercial law simply a copy of German and other Western commercial laws, a “mystery” that Westerns cannot understand, or an “irrelevance” given the role of culture and politics in China? This article critically discusses these three modes of understanding. It is found that,...

In this Article, we intend to fill a gap in the comparative law literature by adopting a case-based approach to comparative corporate law that highlights the important dimension of specific cases in corporate law matters and how identifiable, but limited issues arising from such case disputes...

In the growing literature on comparative corporate law there is often a lack of consideration to the recent advances made in the general field of comparative law. This chapter aims to fill this gap. It outlines a conceptual framework that shows how seven core themes of comparative law can be...

It is one of the common objectives of comparative law to make suggestions on how the law can be improved. In reality, however, comparative lawyers are often uncertain of what to conclude from their findings. For example, having examined a number of legal systems in detail, shall the comparatist...

The leximetric research on shareholder protection can contribute to core questions of comparative company law. For example, such research may be able to show whether or not there is a trend to increase shareholder power across countries. It can also provide us with tools to confirm or challenge...

We use recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 28 developed and emerging economies to test whether the strengthening of shareholder rights in the course of the mid-1990s and 2000s promoted stock market development in those countries. We find only weak and...

In the last two years three important comparative law handbooks have been published (Comparative Law: A Handbook, ed. by Ouml;ruuml;cuuml; and Nelken 2007; The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, ed. by Reinot;mann and Zimmermann 2006; Elgar Encyclopaedia of Comparative Law, ed. by Smits 2006). The...

This article analyzes how shareholder protection has developed in 20 countries from 1995 to 2005. In contrast to traditional legal research, it draws on a quantitative methodology to law ('leximetrics', 'numerical comparative law'). Some of its results are that in most countries shareholder...