In the paper State Ownership and Corporate Governance, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, I explore the role of the state as shareholder in the political economy of corporate governance. Although atypical in the United States, state ownership of listed companies is pervasive and growing elsewhere in the world. According to a recent survey, state-owned enterprises are now responsible for approximately one-fifth of global stock market value, which is more than two times the level observed just one decade ago.

There is a large literature exploring the potential inefficiencies of state control of enterprise, and a growing literature on the ways in which the law, and in particular corporate law, might be structured to limit those inefficiencies. In this paper, I look at the other side of the problem: what is the effect of state ownership on the structure of corporation and capital markets law, not just as it applies to state-controlled firms but as it applies in general to firms that are entirely privately owned? The latter issue is arguably as important as, or even more important than, the problem of controlling the inefficiencies of state ownership, but it has been almost entirely neglected.

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