Codetermination

Recent Developments in German Corporate Governance

Codetermination: A Poor Fit for U.S. Corporations

The idea that a corporation’s employees should be allowed to elect some of the corporation’s board members, a system known as codetermination, has moved to the forefront of U.S. corporate law policy. Elizabeth Warren’s...

Employee Participation in Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility

The chapter investigates the impact of employee participation on the board of directors or supervisory board (particularly codetermination) on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Conceptually, it is important to distinguish...

The German Law of and Experience with the Supervisory Board

Together with a number of other countries including China Germany has a two-tier board system, i.e. its stock corporation law provides for the division between the management board and the supervisory board. This is different from most...

Efficiency Arguments for the Collective Representation of Workers: A Sketch

The dominant agency-cost paradigm for the analysis of corporate law is based on the proposition that the welfare of society is best met by rules which minimise the costs of production through the corporate form. This is...

Lift not the Painted Veil! To Whom are Directors? Duties Really Owed

In this article, we identify a fundamental contradiction in the law of fiduciary duty of corporate directors across jurisdictions, namely the tension between the uniformity of directors? duties and the heterogeneity of directors...

Taming or Protecting the Modern Corporation? Shareholder-Stakeholder Debatesin a Comparative Light

The Dark Side of Shareholder Influence: Toward a Holdup Theory Of Stakeholders in Comparative Corporate Governance

Stakeholder Capitalism, Corporate Governance and Firm Value

In countries such as Germany, the legal system ensures that firms are stakeholder oriented. In others, like Japan, social norms achieve a similar effect. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of stakeholder-oriented firms that...

Taming the Corporate Leviathan: Codetermination and the Democratic State

Two prominent progressive senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have recently proposed that employees should be allowed to elect 40 to 45 percent of the directors of large corporations. If implemented, such a reform would...