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This paper discusses new data on regulatory competition in European company law and the impact of national law reforms, using the example of English company law forms being used by German start-ups. Since 1999, entrepreneurs have been allowed to select foreign legal forms to govern their affairs. The data show that English limited companies have been very popular with German entrepreneurs in the first years of the last decade, but also document a sharp decline from early 2006 onwards. This decline casts doubt over the claim that the German company law reform from November 2008 had ‘successfully fought off’ the use of foreign company forms. Moreover, by contrasting the German data with the corresponding developments in Austria, the paper further demonstrates that the latter jurisdiction sees a similar decline without having reformed its company law. Instead of exclusively relying on law reform as the causal reason for declining foreign incorporation numbers, the paper offers a number of alternative or complementary explanations for the striking developments. The findings are important for our understanding of (defensive) regulatory competition and successful lawmaking.

The recent conflict between Canadian telecommunications provider Telus and US-based hedge fund Mason Capital is the most recent illustration of ‘empty voting’ – a strategy whereby activist investors eliminate their risk exposure to shares in target companies to pursue idiosyncratic motives. As courts are struggling to find adequate solutions, regulators worldwide are called upon to provide reliable tools to this threat to shareholder voting.

Negative risk-decoupling, otherwise known as empty voting, is a popular strategy amongst hedge funds and other activist investors. In short, it is the attempt to decouple the economic risk from the share’s ownership position, retaining in particular the voting right without risk. This paper uses three perspectives to analyse the problems created by negative risk-decoupling: an agency costs approach, an analysis of information costs, and a perspective from corporate finance. It shows how risk-decoupling is a type of market behaviour that creates significant costs for market participants, in particular existing shareholders and potential investors. The paper then develops regulatory responses, envisaged particularly for EU level lawmaking, but also raises underlying issues on a more general level. Whilst several proposed regulatory tools are rejected, the paper prefers a solution that uses continuous transparency as the cornerstone. In addition, it suggests that in certain individual cases, national regulators should be empowered to suspend activists’ voting rights. The paper concludes by offering a concrete legislative proposal, amending the European Transparency Directive.

This paper explores the benefit of using menu structures for regulatory purposes in private law. Menus have been used rarely by regulators and lawmakers in the past. Insofar as they are used, they address situations where market participants have relatively heterogeneous preferences, where the subject matter of regulation itself is heterogeneous, or where a political consensus appears difficult. This paper addresses a number of benefits that reach beyond the traditional perception of menu lawmaking. Benefiting from insights from economics and behavioural science, several benefits can be identified that exploit the full potential of menu lamaking. Central to these benefits is the notion of endowment effect (or status quo bias) involved with traditional default rules: where the law provides just one default rule, market participants will mostly stick to this rule out of pure convenience. This means that simple default rules are frequently inappropriate to identify the preference of market participants. This problem can be overcome by using menus, giving consumers a choice between different options, each of which is endorsed by the authority and impartiality of the parliamentary lawmaker. But menus have many other advantages than traditional black-or-white legal rules.

ISBN: 0003-8997

The rules on assignment and transfer of rights and obligations are currently outside the scope of the proposed CESL. In contrast, the original DCFR from 2009 includes a chapter on these issues. Questions outside the scope of CESL are left to be solved by the ‘domestic’ provisions of the national law that is applicable under the relevant conflict-of-laws provisions. This paper is part of the larger CFR Context research project and explores interactions of the system of assignment of receivables under a future European contract instrument with both English and German national laws. This concerns above all other areas of law, for example the rules that apply upon the insolvency of one of the parties (in particular that of the assignor) and the rules on public policy. Key differences between the jurisdictions include, inter alia, the proprietary aspects of the assignor’s insolvency where the assignor is paid by the debtor, the priority rule for competing assignments, and the effects of a non-assignment clause. Here, the choice of the optional instrument rather than either English or German law will lead to diverging results and may therefore prejudice any of the parties involved.