Mark J. Roe is a professor at Columbia Law School.

"Roe ... argues persuasively that old-fashioned politics ... play[s] the key role in building a structure of corporate finance.... Strong Managers, Weak Owners does for corporate governance what Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand did for the corporation: makes history essential to understanding current practice and policy."---Robert Teitelman, Institutional Investor --- "Economic theory appeared to predict that the American version [of capitalism, in which firms feed on a huge and liquid stockmarket] should be the most efficient. This view stemmed from [Berle and Means] in The Modern Corporation and Private Property ... [and] held sway for the next fifty years.... Roe ... takes this debate a giant step forward. Far from being the inevitable winner of a Darwinian struggle, argues Roe, the Berle-Means corporation owes its existence to American politics, and in particular to a deeply ingrained popular mistrust of concentrated financial power."