Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the World
Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor
Abstract
Recent high-profile corporate scandals—such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan—demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, this book examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. It debunks the simplistic view of law's instrumental function for financial market development and economic growth. Using comparative case studies that a ... More
Recent high-profile corporate scandals—such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan—demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, this book examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. It debunks the simplistic view of law's instrumental function for financial market development and economic growth. Using comparative case studies that address the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Russia, the book argues that a disparate blend of legal and non-legal mechanisms have supported economic growth around the world. It shows that law and markets evolve together in a “rolling relationship,” and legal systems, including those of the most successful economies, therefore differ significantly in their organizational characteristics.
Keywords:
corporate scandals,
Enron,
Yukos,
Livedoor,
capitalist economies,
legal systems,
financial market,
economic growth,
rolling relationship,
corporate governance
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226525273 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226525297.001.0001 |
