Twentieth-Century Enterprise Forms: Japan in Comparative Perspective
研究了日本在1899年商法典中未引入德国式私人有限公司（GmbH）的情况下，仍通过灵活的治理和责任条款推动公司化进程，到1930年代公司数量已超过德国，揭示了法律灵活性比法律家族或混合企业形式更关键。
La Porta et al. see common law as most favorable to corporate development and economic growth, but Japanese legislators explicitly based their system on German civil law. However, Japan’s commercial code of 1899 omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al. see as the jewel in the crown of Germany’s organizational menu. Neither apparent “mistake” retarded Japan’s adoption of the corporate form, because its commercial code offered flexible governance and liability options, implemented liberally. It was this liberal flexibility, not choice of legal family or hybrid corporate forms emphasized by previous writers, that drove corporatization forward in Japan and more widely. Surprisingly (given that Germany’s superficially fuller organizational menu predated Japan’s by many decades and the country was wealthier), by the 1930s Japan already had not only more corporations than Germany, but also more commandite partnerships (with some corporate characteristics). After the introduction of the yugen kaisha (private company) in 1940, corporate forms became nearly as widely used in Japan as in the United States, United Kingdom, or Switzerland.