Markets for capital, products, and managerial talent are expanding rapidly across national borders, yet domestic laws and practices have never had greater impact on corporate structures and cross-border deals. Investors pursuing high returns and diversification, entrepreneurs seeking capital, and managers endeavoring to restructure troubled enterprises now routinely face transaction counter-parties who operate within different legal and political systems, and who rank social priorities quite differently.

This dynamic tension between global markets and domestic institutions fuels the debate on corporate governance reform now raging in virtually every region of the world. It also frames the intellectual agenda of the distinguished contributors to this volume, who examine such issues as the possible convergence of corporate governance practices around the world, national variations in the quality of corporate law, and the fiduciary responsibilities corporate managers around the world owe to their shareholders. Among the book's many insights is the contention that "globalization" and "global markets" are misleading terms, because they mask the local quality of much of the activity occurring within those rubrics. Case studies focus on France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the transition economies of Eastern Europe.

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, "Law and Capitalism" examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. This provocative book 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, Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor argue that a disparate blend of legal and nonlegal mechanisms have supported economic growth around the world. Their groundbreaking findings show 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. Innovative and insightful, "Law and Capitalism" will change the way lawyers, economists, policy makers, and business leaders think about legal regulation in an increasingly global market for capital and corporate governance.

The economic and geopolitical implications of China's rise have been the subject of vast commentary. However, the institutional implications of China's transformative development under state capitalism have not been examined extensively and comprehensively. Regulating the Visible Hand? The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism examines the domestic and global consequences of Chinese state capitalism, focusing on the impact of state-owned enterprises on regulation and policy, while placing China's variety of state capitalism in comparative perspective. It first examines the domestic governance of Chinese state capitalism, looking at institutional design and regulatory policy in areas ranging from the environment and antitrust to corporate law and taxation. It then analyses the global consequences for the regulation of trade, investment and finance. Contributors address such questions as: What are the implications of state capitalism for China's domestic institutional trajectory? What are the global implications of Chinese state capitalism? What can be learned from a comparative analysis of state capitalism?