Strong Managers Weak Owners

In this major reinterpretation of the evolution of the American corporation, Mark Roe convincingly demonstrates that the ownership structure of large U.S. firms owes its distinctive character as much to politics as to economics and technology. His provocative examination addresses essential issues facing American businesses today as they compete in the new international marketplace.

An invaluable resource for owners, board members, executives and advisors, showing how ownership and management interact to shape a firm's strategy.

This volume provides an up-to-the-minute survey of the field of corporate governance, focusing particularly on issues of convergence and diversity. A number of topics are discussed including bankruptcy procedures, initial public offerings, the role of large stakes, comparative corporate governance, and institutional investors.

Most scholarship on corporate governance in the last two decades has focused on the relationships between shareholders and managers or directors. Neglected in this vast literature is the role of employees in corporate governance. Yet "human capital," embodied in the employees, is rapidly becoming the most important source of value for corporations, and outside the United States, employees often have a significant formal role in corporate governance. This volume turns the spotlight on the neglected role of employees by analyzing many of the formal and informal ways that employees are actually involved in the governance of corporations, in U.S. firms and in large corporations in Germany and Japan. Examining laws and contexts, the essays focus on the framework for understanding employees' role in the firm and the implications for corporate governance. They explore how and why the special legal institutions in German and Japanese firms by which employees are formally involved in corporate governance came into being, and the impact these institutions have on firms and on their ability to compete. They also consider theoretical and empirical questions about employee share ownership. The result of a conference at Columbia University, the volume includes essays by Theodor Baums, Margaret M. Blair, David Charny, Greg Dow, Bernd Frick, Ronald J. Gilson, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Nobuhiro Hiwatari, Katharina Pistor, Louis Putterman, Edward B. Rock, Mark J. Roe, and Michael L. Wachter. Margaret M. Blair is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and author of Ownership and Control: Rethinking Corporate Governance for the Twenty-first Century (Brookings, 1995). Mark J. Roe, professor of business regulation and director of the Sloan Project on Corporate Governance at Columbia Law School, is the author of Strong Managers, Weak Owners: The Political Roots of American Corporate Finance (Princeton, 1996).

This book examines contemporary legal and policy issues facing banking and micro-finance supervision and regulation in Zambia. The book sets out an interdisciplinary exposition of the law. It provides an interface of financial services law and practice. Relevant aspects of business management and economic theory are examined as well. The book attempts to permeate intellectual spheres that have not been explored in depth before. In essence, this is not a simple textbook on the introductory aspects of a particular field of law, as is often the case with many books that have titles such as "Introduction to Business Law" or "Fundamentals of Tort Law", and so forth. By contrast, the book breaks new ground in the area of financial services regulation. Indeed, a law in context approach is presented, giving added value to the field of knowledge in the book.

In a painstaking analysis, Roe (law, Harvard Law School) examines the impact of a nation's strong social policies on the corporate governance, suggesting that stronger social policies can cause an American style of diffuse ownership among shareholders to fail. The link between social policies and corporate governance is examined statistically for a large number of countries, and in case studies for seven: Italy, Germany, Sweden, the UK, France, Japan, and the US. Product markets, securities markets, and the ability of corporate and economic structures to induce a political backlash are discussed. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This text presents evidence about corporate governance and performance in a large number of countries. It is the result of a collective research effort by the members of the European Corporate Governance Network (ECGN).

Corporate Governance In A Globalising World: Convergence Or Divergence? presents a broad and multi-disciplinary debate on corporate governance systems by integrating academic viewpoints, statistical evidence, as well as field surveys. Based on a large number of publications and studies, the opinions of researchers are grouped into three categories: those that believe in a convergence into the direction of the market-oriented model (with the Anglo-American model as the reference base), those that opt for another type of convergence, namely in the direction of a hybrid corporate governance model (based on cross-reference between different leading governance models), and those that do not believe in global convergence but adhere to diversity of governance models.