Working Paper
The Corporate Pyramid Fable
In many parts of the world, it is commonplace for wealthy families and successful entrepreneurs to parlay a relatively small financial investment into...
Read more
Law and History by Numbers: Use, But with Care
This paper, prepared for a University of Illinois College of Law symposium honoring Prof. Larry Ribstein, deals with the historical development of...
Read more
The Evolution of Shareholder Voting Rights: Separation of Ownership and Consumption
The nineteenth century saw the standardization and rapid spread of the modern business corporation around the world. Yet those early corporations...
Read more
Shareholder Democracy Under Autocracy: Voting Rights and Corporate Performance in Imperial Russia
This paper investigates how the rules that corporations wrote for themselves related to their financing and performance in an environment...
Read more
The Rise of Corporate Governance in the U.K.: When and Why
While issues that prompt corporate governance responses are endemic to the corporate form, the term "corporate governance" only began to feature with...
Read more
Comparative Corporate Governance: Old and New
The most fundamental comparative corporate governance debates have often focused on two issues. The first one concerns ownership structure: Why are...
Read more
EU Company Law Harmonization Between Convergence and Varieties of Capitalism
This chapter sketches the history of EU Company Law, from its beginnings in the 1960s until today. Throughout all periods, EU company law harmonization...
Read more
Law, Politics and the Rise and Fall of German Stock Market Development, 1870-1938
Law and politics had a significant impact on stock market development in Germany between 1870 and the beginning of World War II. IPOs can be a bellwether...
Read more
Incomplete Organizations: Legal Entities and Asset Partitioning in Roman Commerce
In this chapter we analyze ancient Rome?s law of business entities from the perspective of asset partitioning, by which we mean the delimiting of...
Read more