Extraterritorial Impacts of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on External Corporate Governance - Current Evidence from a German Perspective

Abstract

The paper analyzes the major direct impacts of SOX on the European Union (EU) and Germany as a Member State. The focus of the analysis is on rules concerning external corporate governance instruments. Additionally, the paper investigates whether the contemporary regulatory activities in the EU and Germany concerning external corporate governance can be explained as indirect institutional consequences of SOX. The paper demonstrates that several rules of SOX quite obviously served as a
model for the EU regulatory activities. The same phenomenon can be observed for the new German regulations of external corporate governance.