Speaker: Prof. Merritt B. Fox, Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia Law School

Time: 17:15-18:25 p.m., December 14, 2023, GMT+8

Venue: PKUSZ, STL Building, Room 108

Abstract: 

One of the most striking changes in the world’s capitalist economies has been the rise of cross-border share ownership over the last twenty-five years. The talk will document this rise and seek to understand the relationship between this rise and corporate governance. The starting point is an exploration of the factors independent of corporate-governance considerations that favor a global market for securities and those that impede it. The rise in foreign ownership globally can be explained in significant part by the weakening of these impeding factors. The demand outside a country for the shares of its issuers is determined both by how much the forces impeding a global market for securities have weakened and by the corporate governance of the country’s issuers. This observation suggests pathways of causation between increased foreign ownership and improved corporate governance that run in both directions. For each, the weakening of the forces independent of corporate governance that impede a global market for securities acts as a catalyst.

Source: School of Transnational Law, PKU