This research handbook provides a state-of-the-art perspective on how corporate governance differs between countries around the world. It covers highly topical issues including corporate purpose, corporate social responsibility and shareholder activism.

The business corporation is one of the greatest organizational inventions, but it creates risks both for shareholders and for third parties. To mitigate these risks, legislators, judges, and corporate lawyers have tried to learn from foreign experiences and adapt their regulatory regimes to them. In the last three decades, this approach has led to a stream of corporate and capital market law reforms unseen before. Corporate governance, the system by which companies are directed and controlled, is today a key topic for legislation, practice, and academia all over the world. Corporate scandals and financial crises have repeatedly highlighted the need to better understand the economic, social, political, and legal determinants of corporate governance in individual countries. Comparative Corporate Governance furthers this goal by bringing together current scholarship in law and economics with the expertise of local corporate governance specialists from twenty-three countries.

Comparative Corporate Governance considers the effects of globalization on corporate governance issues and highlights how, despite these widespread consequences, predictions of legal convergence have not come true. By adopting a comparative legal approach, this book explores the disparity between convergence attempts and the persistence of local models of governance in the US, Europe and Asia.

An analytical overview of the regulation of shareholder activism in the UK and Germany. The book shows how the comparative legal method can be used in the study of the corporate governance systems of different countries. It deals with the regulation of the governance of listed companies within a wide framework that recognises the importance of company law, securities markets law, standards and internal rule-making.

"This book goes back to a symposium held at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign Private and Private International Law in Hamburg on May 15-17 1997"--P. [v].

Corporate governance is on the reform agenda all over the world. How will global economic integration affect the different systems of corporate ownership and governance? Is the Anglo-American model of shareholder capitalism destined to become the template for a converging global corporate governance standard or will the differences persist? This reader contains classic work from leading scholars addressing this question as well as several new essays. In a sophisticated political economy analysis that is also attuned to the legal framework, the authors bring to bear efficiency arguments, politics, institutional economics, international relations, industrial organization, and property rights. These questions have become even more important in light of the post-Enron corporate governance crisis in the United States and the European Union's repeated efforts at corporate integration. This will become a key text for postgraduates and academics.

Comprehensive and up-to-date, this important textbook analyzes the escalating crisis in corporate governance and the growing interest in its reform across the globe. Written by a leading name in the field of corporate governance from a genuinely international perspective, this excellent textbook provides a balanced analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Anglo-Saxon, European and Asian traditions of corporate governance; offering a prognosis of the future development, complexity and diversity of corporate governance forms and systems. It: investigates the reasons for the failure of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Parmalat and other major international corporations examines the role of international standards of corporate governance, with the intervention of the OECD, World Bank and IMF explores the continuing cultural diversity in corporate and institutional forms in the United States and UK, Europe and Asia Pacific. Illustrated with a wealth of up-to-the minute case studies and packed full of excellent illustrative material that guides student readers through this complex subject, International Corporate Governance is a must read for anyone studying corporate governance today.