An intense academic debate has arisen recently concerning the crucial quot;bedrockquot; that underpins a corporate governance regime where widely-held public companies dominate. In the discourse, little has been said about the contribution of merger activity. The paper seeks to address this gap...

The quot;law mattersquot; thesis posits that a legal regime which allows investors to feel confident about owning a tiny percentage of shares in a firm constitutes the crucial quot;bedrockquot; underlying an economy where widely-held public companies dominate. This paper draws attention to and...

Market forces allegedly are serving to destabilise traditional business structures and cause some form of convergence along quot;Anglo-Americanquot; lines. While this trend has been the subject of much debate, it has not been widely commented on in Australia. Moreover, those analysing corporate...

Market forces allegedly are serving to destabilise traditional business structures and cause a reorientation along quot;Anglo-Americanquot; lines. This paper examines the alleged quot;convergencequot; trend from an historical perspective. The focus is on Britain, since it is the only major...

A 1970 New York Times essay on corporate social responsibility by Milton Friedman is often said to have launched a shareholder-focused reorientation of managerial priorities in America's public companies. The essay correspondingly is a primary target of those critical of a shareholder-centric...

Accepted views of a classic academic work can quite readily distort the original text. Michael Jensen and William Meckling's widely cited 1976 article “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure” exemplifies the pattern. The article has been cited as a key...

The public company has historically been a crucial element of the American economy. Various predictions have been made recently that the public company's future is bleak. This essay maintains these gloomy conjectures are erroneous. Companies leave the stock market by way of public-to-private...

The analysis of corporate governance has been a one-sided affair. The focus has been on “internal” accountability mechanisms, namely boards and shareholders. Each has become more effective since debates about corporate governance began in earnest in the 1970s but it is doubtful whether this...

This Article offers the first systematic attempt to measure the development of shareholder protection in the United States across time. Using three indices developed to measure the relative strength of shareholder protection across nations, we evaluate numerically the protections corporate and...

The corporate governance arrangements of publicly traded companies have been transformed over the past four decades. Various observers have suggested that Delaware, where more than half of U.S. public companies are incorporated, has done much to influence corporate governance changes. This...