Corporate law and corporate control in West Germany after 1945

Boris Gehlen

Business History, 2019, vol. 61, issue 5, 810-832

Abstract: According to the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ and ‘Law and Finance’ approaches, legal institutions regulating corporate finance and governance shape specific national varieties of capitalism. This article analyses legal debates and practices of corporate control in post-war Germany from the perspective of business history. It argues that the stock corporation law did not have a significant impact on control practices. The law only roughly outlined rights of the supervisory boards and defined minimum standards. There was considerable room for manoeuvre within the corporations, and various effective and some ineffective control arrangements were possible. The article indicates that not only legal institutions but external political and economic factors were important for Germany’s coordinated market economy and for the development of greater capital market control.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2017.1319939 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:61:y:2019:i:5:p:810-832

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2017.1319939

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().