Oxford Business Law Blog

Climate change is one of today’s most salient policy challenges. Under the Paris Agreement, 195 governments agreed to limit temperature increases to well below 2, preferably 1.5, degrees centigrade...

A small number of firms have an outsize impact on climate change. The majority of global carbon emissions since human-induced climate change was officially recognised can be traced to a relatively...

Legal services are traditionally provided by highly-skilled humans—that is, lawyers. During the past two decades, the costs of legal services have risen sharply but productivity has not. At the same...

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies is poised to transform the way value is created and captured in professional services. AI involves the use of computer systems...

Innovation and its main output, technology, are changing the way we work, socialise, vote, and live. New technologies have improved our lives and made firms more productive, overall raising living...

Our recent paper, which forms part of the first phase of the New Special Study of the Securities Markets Project, explores how globalization has affected the operation of securities markets and the...

In the last few years, a new source of finance for start-ups, known as ‘crowdfunding’ (‘CF’), has become widely available. This involves raising capital from a large number of individuals, each of...

On 14 March 2017, the Oxford Business Law Blog ('OBLB') marked its first anniversary. One year ago, we set out to create a leading and truly international forum for the exchange of ideas and...

The weakness of legal institutions supporting finance is a problem shared by most emerging markets, and indeed many developed markets. Prior scholarship and policy work has emphasised the links...

Technology has become so critical to organizational performance that it is now a major boardroom issue, even for firms whose products are not themselves ‘tech’. Technology of ever-increasing...

The third edition of The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach (by Reinier Kraakman, John Armour, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, Henry Hansmann, Gerard Hertig, Klaus Hopt,...

The advent of Brexit has sparked a fierce debate over the implications for the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in the rest of the EU. So far, however, there has been...

Financial services are a very important sector of the UK’s economy, accounting for between 7-12% of GDP, 11% of gross tax receipts, and 7-12% of employment. In a recent paper, prepared for the Oxford...

In Part 1 of this post, I posed the question why risk-averse managers at VW might have failed to launch an internal investigation into any potential smoking guns during the company’s prolonged and...

Even hardened cynics were shocked by the revelations in September that Volkswagen had programmed its diesel cars to defeat emissions tests. Whilst it was no secret that manufacturers attempted to ‘...