Globalization and corporate governance convergence?

Some scholars have argued that globalization should pressure firms to adopt a common set of the most efficient corporate governance practices, while others maintain that such convergence will not occur because of a variety of forms of path-dependence. With hitherto unused data from 24 developing countries and 13 European countries, we search for evidence that globalization is correlated with convergence of corporate governance. We distinguish "convergence in form" from "convergence in function," and de jure from de facto convergence. We find robust evidence of de jure convergence inform at the country level. Interestingly, this is not driven by convergence to U.S. standards. Rather pairs of economically interdependent countries appear to adopt common corporate governance standards. In contrast to the de jure results, we find virtually no evidence of de facto convergence in corporate governance in form or function in a battery of estimations at the country, industry and firm levels.