Oxford Business Law Blog

Government regulation on disclosure differs considerably across countries. This gives rise to some interesting research questions. One line of research is investigating if certain types of disclosure...

Over the past twenty years, a robust secondary market has emerged in the debt of Chapter 11 firms. Critics worry that the trading associated with this market has undermined bankruptcy governance, by...

Executive and non-executive directors with access to private and price-sensitive information have, as insiders, an advantage over other investors when trading in the shares of their firm. Even if...

A bill (SB-826, the ‘Bill’) that would impose a quota for women on boards of public companies was recently approved by California’s State Senate and Assembly. Once signed by the governor, the law...

Two of my recent articles examine securities class action litigation and SEC enforcement against foreign corporations seeking to tap American capital markets (see here and here). To evaluate public...

In July 2018, the European Parliament passed a resolution recommending to the Commission the creation of an optional EU-wide legal status for social enterprises. The Commission now has one year to...

On 25 April the Commission published its proposal for a directive amending Directive 2017/1132 as regards cross-border conversions, mergers and divisions (Proposal). One of the aspects of the...

How do we measure shareholder protection? For more than ten years, the Centre of Business Research (CBR) at the University of Cambridge has developed datasets on shareholder, creditor and worker...

Corporate law is theoretically rich but historically poor. There is a ‘pre-history’ of corporate law that is prior to the discipline’s historical knowledge, horizon and imagination; a pre-history of...

Venture capital (‘VC’) is widely recognized as a crucial driver of economic growth, job creation, and commercialization of cutting-edge technology. In the Singapore context, the VC industry is...

The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath had a broad impact on how the financial system is understood to work and how it influences the wider economy. Macroeconomists have highlighted the role...

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion in seed financing for early-stage technology startups. Increasingly, this seed financing is channeled to these companies via an entirely new form of...

Regulators have made great progress over the past decade in designing mechanisms to deal with a failed systemically important financial institution (SIFI) in a way that avoids both a bailout and the...

Debt-based crowdfunding (‘crowdlending’ or ‘peer to peer lending’) is growing as an alternative finance market within the EU. Yet it has many risks for investors. A lack of regulation of the emerging...

In the 1970s and 80s, as major financial institutions grew and diversified their operations, courts and scholars recognized that fiduciary law posed profound challenges for the organizational...

The regulatory requirement for banks to hold capital is related to the safety net afforded by (often implicit) government guarantees. Regulators are also concerned about the possibility of systemic...

As part of a research project on ‘Shareholders’ Duties’, such as inter alia the duties to disclose (e.g. major holdings, engagement policy etc.), and the duty not to abuse rights, this post aims to...

Voting at annual general shareholder meetings (AGMs) has been shown to be valuable. This makes perfect sense as voting gives shareholders a say on important corporate decisions, such as the...

In May 2016 the Insolvency Service issued a consultation on the corporate insolvency framework in the UK (for discussion see Part I and Part 2 of an earlier OBLB blog by this author). This was...

The European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) featured a Focus Panel on ‘Common Ownership: Antitrust Meets Corporate Governance’ at their Annual Members’ Meeting in Berlin, in May 2018. The...

Our recent article, which we co-authored with Angus Chan, examines the main challenges for achieving regulatory convergence and coordination for depositor preference rules and explicit deposit...