Comparative Law by Numbers? Legal Origins Thesis, &lt;I&gt;Doing Business&lt;/I&gt; Reports, and the Silence of Traditional Comparative Law

Michaels, Ralf

doi:10.5131/ajcl.2008.0022

Cited by 91 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Not only were the latter also bound up with legal origin, but also they inevitably diluted owner rights, making for worse economic performance in civil law countries [Botero et al, 2004]. This approach has been hugely influential with the policy community, most notably via the World Bank Doing Business reports [Cooney et al, 2010, Michaels, 2009; undeterred by the fact that it is not easy to change legal origin, the latter body has aggressively pushed to deregulate labour markets, on the assumption that such interventions will leave property owners better off, and this will be good for growth. The argument is that what happens in organisations is that managers are thus forced to align with the interests of owners, rather than conspiring with workers in empire building projects that maximise employment in the interests of prestige (2006).…”

Section: Rational Hierarchical Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Governance and Human Resource Management

Wood

Brewster

2016

ACG

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Section: Rational Hierarchical Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporate Governance and Human Resource Management

Wood

Brewster

2016

ACG

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“…On the other hand, a more gradual quantification necessarily requires judgments to be made that will, to some extent, be conditional on the interpretation found most convincing. Scholars generally do not go so far as to conclude that quantitative techniques are inappropriate in legal scholarship because of these reasons, but they caution against oversimplification and the blind faith in the comparability of any aspect of a legal system (Epstein and Martin, 2010;Michaels, 2009;Siems, 2005b). The key, it seems, is to be aware of the tradeoff between accuracy and objectivity inevitably involved in the quantification of social…”

Section: Reductionismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion of regulatory innovations: the case of corporate governance codes

Gerner-Beuerle

2016

Journal of Institutional Economics

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Abstract. Since the 1990s, most European countries have adopted detailed corporate governance codes regulating listed companies. Even though the initial codes were designed against the backdrop of a particular jurisdiction, best practice standards have become remarkably similar across legal traditions. This raises the question whether the codes are sufficiently responsive to local conditions, or standard setters are mainly motivated by the concern not to fall behind internationally accepted benchmark standards. The article quantifies central corporate governance provisions and maps their international diffusion. Controlling for differences in legal families and ownership structure, the article shows that the diffusion of best practice standards leads to a statistically significant increase in the likelihood that a foreign standard setter will adopt a broadly similar provision. The findings indicate that codes are often seen as signalling devices, irrespective of whether or not the adopted standards are well aligned with the domestic economic and legal environment.

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“…But this comes, more often than not, with a price. 10 Far too often, social scientific studies in comparative law fall into one of three traps, all related. The first of those traps is the mere replacement of legal with economic language, with no gain made.…”

Section: C) Beyond Legal Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%