Person:

Roe, Mark

Legal origin - civil vs. common law - is said in much modern economic work to determine the strength of financial markets and the structure of corporate ownership, even in the world''s richer nations. The main means are thought to lie in how investor protection and property protection connect to civil and common law legal origin. But, I show here, although stockholder protection, property rights, and their supporting legal institutions are quite important, legal origin is not their foundation.

Modern politics is an alternative explanation for divergent ownership structures and the differing depths of securities markets in the world''s richer nations. Some legislatures respect property and stock markets, instructing their regulators to promote financial markets; some do not. Brute facts of the twentieth century - the total devastation of many key nations, wrecking many of their prior institutions - predict modern postwar financial markets'' strength well and tie closely to postwar divergences in politics and policies in the world''s richest nations. Nearly every core civil law nation suffered military invasion and occupation in the twentieth century - the kinds of systemic shocks that destroy even strong institutions - while no core common law nation collapsed under that kind of catastrophe. The interests and ideologies that thereafter dominated in the world''s richest nations and those nations'' basic economic tasks (such as postwar reconstruction for many) varied over the last half century, and these differences in politics and tasks made one collection of the world''s richer nations amenable to stock markets and another indifferent or antagonistic. These political economy ideas are better positioned than legal origin concepts to explain the differing importance of financial markets in the wealthy West.

Legal origin has been brought forward as a key influence on modern finance, because common law institutions protect investors better than do civil law institutions, it is claimed. These institutional differences are said, in the legal origin explanation, to have been hard-wired into nations centuries ago. Daniel Klerman and Paul Mahoney challenge the legal origin description of the jury as emerging and achieving prominence in 12th- and 13th-century England while remaining unimportant in France. That contrast has been offered as a key difference between common and civil law, one dependent on the differences in relative power between the English monarch and the French one in the 13th century. But the investigation of the jury here should give pause to those promoting the overall legal origin thesis. The first reason to hesitate is that the jury is not central to protecting outside investors in common law nations. Indeed America's premier corporate court—the Delaware Chancery court—sits without a jury, and the usual view in legal circles is that the jury's absence (and the resulting decision-making by expert judges, not juries) is a strength of the court, not a weakness. The second reason is that Britain did not generally transfer the jury system to its colonies, because to have done so would have conflicted with its colonial goals. That is not a secondary point: political economy issues regularly trump issues like legal origin—colonial policy was just one example of how political goals displace secondary institutions. The third reason is that analysis for the jury differences between civil and common law nations depends on political economy differences centuries ago. But if political economy differences determined institutional differences in the earlier centuries, it is plausible that political economy differences in the intervening centuries would also have affected financial outcomes. Indeed modern political economy differences that lead some nations to support capital markets and others to denigrate them could explain modern financial differences as much as, or more than, 13th century political differences.

Industrial organization affects the relative effectiveness of the shareholder wealth maximization norm in maximizing total social wealth. In nations where product markets are not strongly competitive, a strong shareholder primacy norm fits less comfortably with social wealth maximization than elsewhere because, where competition is weak, shareholder primacy induces managers to cut production and raise price more than they otherwise would. Where competition is fierce, managers do not have that option. There is a rough congruence between this inequality of fit and the varying strengths of shareholder primacy norms around the world. In Continental Europe, for example, shareholder primacy norms have been weaker than in the United States. Historically, Europe's fragmented national product markets were less competitive than those in the United States, thereby yielding a fit between their greater skepticism of the norm's value and the structure of their product markets. As Europe's markets integrate, making its product markets more competitive, pressure has arisen to strengthen shareholder norms and institutions.

A revisionist consensus among corporate law academics has begun to coalesce that, after a century of academic thinking to the contrary, states do not compete head-to-head on an ongoing basis for chartering revenues, leaving Delaware alone in the ongoing interstate charter market. The revisionist view pushes us to consider how free Delaware is to act. Where and when would it come up against boundaries, punishments, and adverse consequences? When do other states (and Washington) constrain Delaware? Recent state corporate lawmaking helps us to define those boundaries in terms of potential state competition and to see that the critical actors are not other states’ lawmakers directly, but Delaware’s own corporate constituents who, if disgruntled, can induce other states to enact new laws. Moreover, analysis of previously unassembled chartering revenue data from Delaware’s Secretary of State’s office displays a vital dimension of state competition, once thought to be relatively unimportant, but that’s becoming increasingly powerful: Delaware’s tax base is eroding, and it’s eroding faster in the past decade or so than ever.

Delaware must move ever faster to replenish that erosion. The dynamism of American business interacts with even a lackluster state-based corporate chartering market to put powerful pressure on Delaware, whose business base is persistently eroding as firms merge, close, and restructure.

American corporate law scholars have long focused on state-to-state jurisdictional competition as a powerful engine in the making of American corporate law. Yet much corporate law is made in Washington, D.C. Federal authorities regularly make law governing the American corporation, typically via the securities law - from shareholder voting rules, to boardroom composition, to dual class stock, to Sarbanes-Oxley - and they could do even more. Properly conceived, the United States has two primary corporate lawmaking centers - the states (primarily Delaware) and Washington. We are beginning to better understand how they interact, as complements and substitutes, but the foundational fact of American corporate lawmaking during the past century is that whenever there has been a big issue - the kind of thing that could strongly affect capital costs - Washington acted or considered acting. Here I review the concepts of the vertical interaction, indicate what still needs to be examined, and examine one Washington-Delaware interaction in detail over time. Overall, we cannot understand the governmental structure of American corporate lawmaking well just by examining the nature, strength, and weaknesses of state-to-state jurisdictional competition.

An enduring inquiry for American corporate law scholars is why the small state of Delaware dominates corporate chartering in the United States. Several theories explain the result. I add another partial explanation: size alone makes Delaware attractive to reincorporating firms by making the state’s corporate law more important to the American economy - and corporate interest groups - than that of other states. Any single state with a small number of incorporations could disrupt their firms’ corporate structures without inducing any repercussions in Washington. But Delaware - or really its corporate law - is “too big to fail.” Damaged players in other states would be unable to enlist Washington to reverse the result. Nor would the low volume players be wary of Washington’s attention and the possibility of it over-reacting if a major corporate issue reached its agenda. Delaware, though, as home to about half of the American corporate economy, could not seriously disrupt American business without repercussion.

Strong financial markets are widely thought to propel economic development, with many in finance seeing legal tradition as fundamental to protecting investors sufficiently for finance to flourish. Kenneth Dam, in the Law-Growth Nexus, finds that the legal tradition view inaccurately portrays how legal systems work, how laws developed historically, and how government power is allocated in the various legal traditions. Yet, after probing the legal origins’ literature for inaccuracies, Dam does not deeply develop an alternative hypothesis to explain the world’s differences in financial development. Nor does he challenge the origins core data, which could be origins’ trump card. Hence, his analysis will not convince many economists, despite that his legal learning suggests conceptual and factual difficulties for the legal origins explanations. Yet, a dense political economy explanation is already out there and the origins-based data has unexplored weaknesses consistent with Dam’s contentions. Knowing if the origins view is truly fundamental, flawed, or secondary is vital for financial development policymaking, because policymakers who believe it will pick policies that imitate what they think to be the core institutions of the preferred legal tradition. But if they have mistaken views, as Dam indicates they might, as to what the legal traditions’ institutions really are and which types of laws really are effective, or what is really most important to financial development, they will make policy mistakes ─ potentially serious ones.

Political instability impedes financial development and is a primary determinant of differences in financial development around the world. Four conventional measures of national political instability — Alesina and Perotti’s (1996) well-known index of instability, a subsequent index derived from Banks’ (2005) work, and two indices of managerial perceptions of nation-by-nation political instability — persistently predict a wide range of national financial development outcomes for recent decades. These results are robust to other factors prominent in the literature in the past decade and hold for a range of key financial outcomes for data over all available years and all available countries over several decades. Political instability’s significance is time consistent back to the 1960’s, the period when the key data becomes available, robust in both country fixed-effects and instrumental variable regressions, and consistent across multiple measures of instability and of financial development. Overall, the results indicate the existence of an important channel running from political instability, principally in nondemocratic settings, to financial backwardness. The robust significance of that channel extends existing work demonstrating the importance of political economy explanations for financial development and financial backwardness. It should help to better understand what policies will work for financial development, because political instability has causes, cures, and effects quite distinct from those of many of the key institutions most studied in the past decade as explaining financial backwardness.

In this review piece, I outline the institutions of corporate governance decision-making in the large public firm in the wealthy West. By corporate governance, I mean the relationships at the top of the firm - the board of directors, the senior managers, and the stockholders. By institutions I mean those repeated mechanisms that allocate authority among the three and that affect, modulate, and control the decisions made at the top of the firm.

Core corporate governance institutions respond to two distinct problems, one of vertical governance (between distant shareholders and managers) and another of horizontal governance (between a close, controlling shareholder and distant shareholders). Some institutions deal well with vertical corporate governance but do less well with horizontal governance. The institutions interact as complements and substitutes, and many can be seen as developing out of a primitive of contract law.

In Part I, I sort out the central problems of corporate governance. In Part II, I catalog the basic institutions of corporate governance, from markets to organization to contract. In part III, I consider contract law as corporate law's primitive building-block. In Part IV, I briefly examine issues of corporate legitimacy that affect corporate governance by widening or narrowing the tools available. The interaction between political institutions and corporate governance institutions is an inquiry still in its infancy but promises large returns. In Part V, I re-examine corporate governance in terms of economies of scale, contract, markets, and property rights. Then I summarize and conclude.

American corporate governance faces two core instabilities. The first is the separation of ownership from control - distant and diffuse stockholders own, while concentrated management controls - a separation that creates not only great efficiencies but also big recurring breakdowns. In every decade since World War II, we've faced a fundamental large firm problem. Each emanated from this fundamental instability. We will not stabilize, once-and-for-all, this instability because some form of separation is necessary for large firms, because it provides large efficiencies, and because once we resolve one derivative problem, another will in time arise. The Enron-type scandals are just the latest manifestation of the core fissure in the large American public firm.

The second instability arises from our decentralized and porous regulatory system. Decentralization has key advantages - such as flexibility, specialization, and multiple informational channels - but with the advantages come costs in porosity. Our decentralized regulatory system leaves each regulator with weaknesses. Most importantly, they are not fully independent from the regulated. The regulated entities often deter the incompletely independent regulated from acting. The regulated can induce political authorities to deny the regulator enough power to act, they can get Congress to cut the regulator's funding, they can fight the potential regulations in courts and Congress, and they can weaken the quality of the regulation that they face. The Enron-class scandals illustrate this regulatory instability of American corporate governance well. Thus one structural response to the first fissure - separation and managers without immediate bosses - would be to facilitate gatekeeping, via strong boards that check managers, via strong shareholders with the motivation to channel managers toward profitability, via powerfully independent, professionally-driven accountants who verify managers' report card, and so on. Some of these gatekeeping functions arise from contract, best practice, and the natural path of the market. Many are facilitated by regulation, but here the regulated - often managers themselves - can affect the regulatory outcomes, often weakening it. Some regulation that does occur arises when public outrage is sufficiently high that the regulation is more brittle and less supple than would be ideal.

Neither of these instabilities can be solved once-and-for-all, so that we can put it behind us. Instead, we resolve the local and immediate problem, move on, and in time face a new problem emanating from one or both of these core instabilities. We muddle through; we don't solve, because we can't.