Professors Bratton and McCahery take up the main questions addressed by the literature on comparative corporate governance: whether national governance systems can be expected to converge in the near fu ture, and whether the fo cal point of that convergence will be a new, hybrid governance system comprised of the best practices drawn fr om different sys tems. Th is Article advances the view that neither global convergence that eliminates sys temic di f ferences nor the emergence of a hybrid

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... practice safe ly can be projected because each national governance system is a sys tem to a significant extent. Each system, rather than consisting of a loose collection of separable components, is tied together by a complex incentive structure. In terdependencies between each system's components and the incentives of its actors create significant barriers to cross reference to and fr om other systems. Th e cross reference hypothesis, zn contrast, presupposes divisible corporate governance institutions-a world zn which one system's