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\"This book provides a new intellectual, economic and legal history of capitalism from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century\"-- Provided by publisher.

France and Spain have similar labour market institutions and their unemployment rates were both around 8% just before the Great Recession but subsequently that rate has increased to 10% in France and to 23% in Spain. In this article, we assess the part of this differential that is due to the larger gap between the firing costs of permanent and temporary contracts, and the laxer rules on the use of the latter in Spain. A calibrated search and matching model indicates that Spain could have avoided about 45% of its unemployment surge had it adopted the French employment protection legislation.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of Grenelle I and Grenelle II laws on financial performance, social performance, and risk-taking in France. The study is focussed on SBF120 (The SBF120 index consists of the 120 largest capitalizations listed on the French Stock Exchange market (SBF: Société des Bourses Françaises)) firms between 2005 and 2016. It provides the following results: first, it shows that after the introduction of the Grenelle I and II laws, financial performance decreased while corporate risk increased, particularly in low polluting industries. One explanation for this is that Grenelle laws are based on the comply or explain principle which may lead to adaptative and interpretative disclosure strategies. In addition, environmental regulations may involve high costs of compliance. In the short-term, environmental disclosure regulations do not drive businesses to improve their social performance: they have not been able to undertake socially and environmentally responsible projects based on good governance practices. Using the Environmental Policy Stringency EPS index to measure the stringency of environmental policy, we show that international binding laws such as the Paris Agreement, unlike locally binding Grenelle laws, are able to enhance the overall social performance through the environmental, social and governance channels. In the long-term, Grenelle laws show effective results on the environmental performance and the quality of governance which enhance the overall social performance without impairing the financial one. Finally, quantile regression analysis provides evidence that businesses are likely to increase their environmental performance at the expense of low financial and overall social performances.

Using longitudinal data on labour law in France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States over the period 1970–2010, the authors estimate the impact of labour regulation on unemployment and the labour share of national income. Their dynamic panel data analysis distinguishes between the short‐run and long‐run effects of regulatory change. They find that worker‐protective labour laws in general have no consistent relationship to unemployment but are positively correlated with labour's share of national income. Laws specifically relating to working time and employee representation are found to have beneficial effects on both efficiency and distribution thus proxied.

This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had important advantages over the main alternative form of organization (partnerships), it also had disadvantages that limited its appeal to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, when businesses were provided with an intermediate choice, the private limited liability company (PLLC) that combined the advantages of legal personhood and joint stock with a flexible internal organizational structure, most chose not to organize as corporations. This article tracks the changes that occurred in the menu of business organizational forms in two common-law countries (the United Kingdom and the United States) and two countries governed by legal codes (France and Germany) and presents data showing the rapidity with which firms in each country responded to enabling legislation for PLLCs. We show that the PLLC was introduced first and most easily in a code country (Germany) and last and with the most difficulty in a commonlaw country (the United States). Late introduction was associated with prolonged use of the partnership form, suggesting that the disadvantages of corporations did indeed weigh heavily on SMEs.

In comparative legal scholarship, particularly comparative corporate law, the major studies are directed towards comparing the current legal provisions, while legal developments of these provisions are sporadically investigated. Still where such an attempt has been made, the arguments therein are rarely substantiated with any descriptive analysis of statutory laws. This article analyses, in historical perspective, the substantive legal provisions of different jurisdictions in the period 1850-1910. After conducting a detailed study of the developments of company laws in these countries, it is argued that politico-economic factors coupled with political ideologies at national and international level, are the prime reasons for the legislation of company law. These factors are common irrespective of legal family the country under study belongs to.

We analyse how institutional complementarities between employee representation laws and dismissal restrictions influence aggregate innovation outcomes. We argue that greater employee voice, due to improved employee representation legislations, may spur innovative effort by employees only when shareholders cannot renegotiate ex-ante agreements with workers over revenue sharing, by threatening dismissal. We perform a panel regression analysis, exploiting country-sector panel data over the 1977–2005 period, and find that stronger employee representation laws in the presence of stricter firing restrictions are in fact associated with higher patenting activity. Consistently with our theoretical argument, the magnitude of this empirical relationship is seen to be relatively larger in those sectors where the human capital contribution to production is higher. Implications for the analysis of economic institutions and for legal policy making are proposed.

The influence of the patent system on the economic performance of Western countries during the Industrial Revolution is an important but difficult question to address. With the United Kingdom and the United States, France was one of the first countries to adopt a modern patent legislation in 1791. The aim of this paper is to understand the paradox of such a system, which was based on a democratic and natural-right conception of invention but turned out to be restrictive. It analyses the legal framework and its evolution from 1791 to the late 1850s and reveals its contradictory aspects: a natural right inspiration vs a restrictive access due to the cost of the patent. It shows how the 1844 Patent Act reform did not end the criticism of the French patent system. Then, in a second part, it considers the diffusion of patents in time, in different regions and industries and stresses the heterogeneity of the patent system.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how an environmental threat (possible quotas for female supervisory directors) might change supervisory board gender composition in SBF120 French company boards between 2008 and 2010. Design/methodology/approach – From a census of supervisory board membership of SBF120 companies in France in January 2008 and December 2010, data were obtained to test hypotheses relating to changes in gender composition of boards and demographic differences between new and earlier director appointees. The authors drew on institutional theory to inform the discussion of this paper’s findings. Findings – The authors reveal significant increases over 2008-2010 in SBF120 board female representation and significant cohort differences between recent and earlier appointees. Newer female appointees differed from male peers and from earlier appointed females and males, bringing youth and international experience. New females were more likely to gain CAC40 seats than their male peers. There was an increase in boards with multiple female directors. Research limitations/implications – Actual motivations for increase in female appointments are unknown, but institutional theory provides possible explanations, as suggestion of coercive forces loomed. Chairmen of larger firms may have made strategic choices to attract younger and English-speaking foreign women, before the rush. Limitations include the descriptive nature of the paper, but it sets a benchmark for later studies to monitor progress in depth. Practical implications – The talent pool for female directors has widened to include foreign English-speaking women, bringing a range of new insights and experience of international governance practice to traditional French boardrooms. However, this could be seen as further discriminatory practice that requires female appointees to bring more human and social capital than that required of their male peers. Originality/value – This is the first paper charting the changes in supervisory board composition during the three-year period of environmental unrest as quotas were proposed and legislated in France and comparing new and existing cohort French director demographics.

This article uses a company law reform in Morocco as a natural experiment to study the value of corporate governance for bank credit. In 2001, Morocco replaced a company law from 19th-century France with modern standards of corporate accountability; this reform was very similar to reforms implemented in many developing countries at about the same time. I evaluate the impact of that reform upon manufacturing firms' access to bank credit, using panel data to test the effect upon bank overdraft provision of a firm's legal obligations (i.e., the firm's choice of the more onerous SA status rather than the less onerous SARL). I find that the reform induced many SA firms to switch to SARL, and that—relative to firms remaining in the SA status—this caused a significant and substantial withdrawal of overdraft facilities. I show that this result is robust to firm's fixed effects and to the choice of explanatory variables, and I consider heterogeneous effects across different firms. I conclude that the reform may have been counter-productive in several important respects.