A Cautionary Note on Drawing Lessons from Comparative Corporate Law

Abstract

Mark Roe's article comparing German, Japanese, and U.S. corporate governance extends his important research concerning the effect of political constraints on the organization of U.S. corporations. In this latest publication, Roe painstakingly compares governance arrangements, highlighting the variability in business organization that exists across nations, to obtain guidance for reforming U.S. institutions. This is valuable comparative institutional research, but the lesson to be drawn from the mutability of the corporate form is opaque. As Roe suggests, the legal and institutional differences across the three nations make it difficult to ascertain whether one approach to corporate governance is superior to another and whether a superior organizational form could be successfully transplanted into another setting. Yet without a means to make comparative judgments, the likelihood that helpful lessons can be drawn from other nations' experiences for reforming our own institutions is diminished, and the rationale for making the comparisons in the first place becomes problematic.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.