Bull-Dog Sauce for the Japanese Soul? Courts, Corporations, and Communities—A Comment on Haley\u27s View of Japanese Law

In this short Essay, I take stock of the recent hostile takeover developments in Japan with an eye toward Haley’s conception of Japanese law and its trajectory into the future. Part I briefly outlines my major arguments in the previous essay. Readers familiar with that work can fastforward to Part II, which examines post-Livedoor developments. Part III takes stock of these developments in light of Haley’s ideas about the animating principle of law and the role of the courts in twentieth-century Japan. I conclude that Haley’s perspective is very helpful in understanding how the judiciary has responded to legal issues arising out of takeover bids thus far. But an examination of how the courts wound up with this issue and how they have resolved it to date sheds light on some potentially negative consequences and limitations of this approach, particularly as the Japanese economy and society become more heterogeneous

Japan\u27s Experience with Deposit Insurance and Failing Banks: Implications for Financial Regulatory Design?

This Article examines three decades of Japanese experience with deposit insurance andfailing banks, and analyzes the implications of that experience for bank safety net reform in other countries. To date, the literature and policy debate on deposit insurance have been heavily colored by U.S. banking history and have focused almost exclusively on explicit deposit protection schemes. Analysis of Japan\u27s safety net experience suggests that (a) deposit insurance, for all its flaws, is superior to the real-world alternative-implicit government protection of depositors and discretionary regulatory intervention in bank distress, (b) a well-designed explicit deposit insurance system that includes a credible bank closure policy is the starting point for the design of effective private alternatives to a government-run safety net, and (c) the trend toward greater institutionalization of the Japanese safety net-culminating in recent legislation to address the financial crisis-reflects increased political competition and greater emphasis on legal as opposed to reputational systems of economic ordering in that countr

Foreword: Path Dependence and Comparative Corporate Governance

This symposium issue of the Washington University Law Quarterly focuses the application of path dependence to corporate institutions on a natural topic: comparative corporate governance

Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World

This book explores the relationship between legal systems and economic development by examining, through a methodology we call the institutional autopsy, a series of high profile corporate governance crises around the world over the past six years. We begin by exposing hidden assumptions in the prevailing view on the relationship between law and markets, and provide a new analytical framework for understanding this question. Our framework moves away from the canonical distinction between common law and civil law regimes. It emphasizes the constant, iterative, rolling relationship between law and markets, and suggests that how a given country\u27s legal system rolls with economic changes depends significantly on its organization rather than its formal characteristics or legal origin. We find that legal systems around the world differ significantly along two crucial organizational dimensions: their degree of centralization of the lawmaking and enforcement processes, and the primary function law serves in support of market activity, ranging from protective functions to coordinative functions. We use this analytical framework to understand why countries as diverse as the United States, Germany, Japan, Korea, China, and Russia have all experienced corporate crises in recent years, and to analyze the different institutional responses to these crises. These case studies provide insights into the diversity of legal systems and institutional arrangements that support capitalist activity over time and across a range of societies. They also suggest that systemic legal change is rarely achieved by changes in formal law alone, but is the result of changes in the composition and identity of core constituencies within a given system who use (or avoid) law to advance their position in the market. Among other things, our study suggests the need for new thinking about how and why legal systems change, the limits of convergence even in a world where national laws increasingly look alike, and a new emphasis on the demand for law in the process of legal adaptation and change

F. Hodge O\u27Neal Corporate and Securities Law Symposium: Path Dependence and Comparative Corporate Governance

The study of institutions, and particularly the study of institutions that societies use to govern business enterprises, is at a point of transition. In the last two or three decades, scholars focusing on economic principles to define appropriate legal rules and corporate institutions rose up to challenge the traditional orthodoxy of corporate governance found in the Berle and Means corporation. One of the most exciting trends in the literature rests upon the increasing marginal returns school of economics associated with Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute. The traditional neoclassical economic theory of production, familiar from decades of undergraduate and graduate courses in microeconomic theory, focuses on competition between products in terms of decreasing marginal returns. The idea is that the economy will settle to a competitive (and optimal) equilibrium at the point where the decreasing marginal returns that sellers can obtain from increasing production just equal the increasing marginal costs of producing more and more units of a given product. As a producer increases the amount of production of a given product, it must sell to purchasers less excited about the product. Demand for additional units decreases, which in turn decreases marginal revenue

Governance Challenges of Listed State- Owned Enterprises Around the World: National Experiences and a Framework for Reform

Despite predictions of their demise in the aftermath of the collapse of socialist economies in Eastern Europe, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are very much alive in the global economy. The relevance of listed SOEs— firms subject to government ownership, but with a portion of their shares traded on public stock markets— has persisted and even increased around the world, as policymakers have encouraged the partial floating of SOE shares either as a first step toward, or as an alternative to, privatization. In this Article, we evaluate the governance challenges associated with mixed ownership of enterprise, and examine a variety of national approaches to the governance of listed SOEs, with a view to framing a robust policy discussion in many countries where SOE reform is a topic of major significance. We describe the evolution and current status of the institutional framework applicable to listed SOEs in eight different jurisdictions which reflect a variety of economic, legal, and political environments: France, the United States, Norway, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, Singapore, and China. We leverage the lessons from this comparative analysis by critiquing the policy prescriptions of international agencies such as the OECD and framing our own policy suggestions

Governance Challenges of Listed State- Owned Enterprises Around the World: National Experiences and a Framework for Reform

Despite predictions of their demise in the aftermath of the collapse of socialist economies in Eastern Europe, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are very much alive in the global economy. The relevance of listed SOEs— firms subject to government ownership, but with a portion of their shares traded on public stock markets— has persisted and even increased around the world, as policymakers have encouraged the partial floating of SOE shares either as a first step toward, or as an alternative to, privatization. In this Article, we evaluate the governance challenges associated with mixed ownership of enterprise, and examine a variety of national approaches to the governance of listed SOEs, with a view to framing a robust policy discussion in many countries where SOE reform is a topic of major significance. We describe the evolution and current status of the institutional framework applicable to listed SOEs in eight different jurisdictions which reflect a variety of economic, legal, and political environments: France, the United States, Norway, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, Singapore, and China. We leverage the lessons from this comparative analysis by critiquing the policy prescriptions of international agencies such as the OECD and framing our own policy suggestions

Shifting Influences on Corporate Governance: Capital Market Completeness and Policy Channeling

Corporate governance scholarship is typically portrayed as driven by single factor models, for example, shareholder value maximization, director primacy or team production. These governance models are Copernican; one factor is or should be the center of the corporate governance solar system. In this essay, we argue that, as with binary stars, the shape of the governance system is at any time the result of the interaction of two central influences, which we refer to as capital market completeness and policy channeling. In contrast to single factor models, which reflect a stable normative statement of what should drive corporate governance, in our account the relation between these two governance influences is dynamic. Motivated by Albert Hirschman’s Shifting Involvements, we posit that all corporate governance systems undergo repeated shifts in the relative weights of the two influences on the system. Capital market completeness determines the corporate ownership structure and privileges shareholder governance and value maximization by increasing the capacity to slice risk, return, and control into different equity instruments. The capability to specify shareholder control rights makes the capital market more complete, tailoring the character of influence associated with holding particular equity securities and its reciprocal, the exposure of management to capital market oversight. Policy channeling, the real government’s instrumental use of the corporation for distributional or social ends, pushes the corporate governance gravitational center toward purposes other than maximizing shareholder value. We show that this pattern is not limited to a particular country, and illustrate our argument by tracing the cyclical reframing of Berle and Means’ thesis in the U.S., Japan’s sluggish shift from policy channeling in its postwar heyday toward capital market completeness under the Abenomics reforms, and the distinctive case of China, where capital market completeness has itself been used as a policy channeling instrument under the pervasive influence of the Chinese Communist Party, creating the world’s most stakeholder-oriented system of corporate governance. We close by examining the means through which the current shift toward policy channeling in U.S. and U.K. corporate governance is taking place – the “stewardship” movement and the debate over “corporate purpose.” We view both as a reaction to the reduced managerial discretion caused by the reconcentration of ownership in the hands of institutional investors, and analyze factors suggesting that this reform movement, like others before it, is likely destined to result in a disappointment-driven shift in the opposite direction, what we label a shifting influence

Beyond Ownership: State Capitalism and the Chinese Firm

Chinese state capitalism has been treated as essentially synonymous with state-owned enterprises (SOEs). But drawing a stark distinction between SOEs and privately owned enterprises (POEs) misperceives the reality of China’s institutional environment and its impact on the formation and operation of large enterprises of all types. We challenge the “ownership bias” of prevailing analyses of Chinese firms by exploring the blurred boundary between SOEs and POEs in China. We argue that the Chinese state has less control over SOEs and more control over POEs than its ownership interest in the firms suggests. Our analysis indicates that Chinese state capitalism can be better explained by capture of the state than by ownership of enterprise. We explain the mechanisms of capture in China and argue that due to China’s institutional environment, large, successful firms—regardless of ownership— exhibit substantial similarities in areas commonly thought to distinguish SOEs from POEs: market dominance, receipt of state subsidies, proximity to state power, and execution of the state’s policy objectives. We explore the significant implications of this argument for theory, policy, and law