Oxford Business Law Blog

Law and technology-related research has arrived in the world of corporate law, as academics begin to tackle topics like artificial intelligence (AI), increasing automation and robots, Big Data, and...

In this article, I document and explain the pervasive influence of nationalist impulses in shaping corporate law around the world and throughout History—a phenomenon which I term “the grip of...

Firms with strong corporate governance are often likened to democracies. Through their proposals and votes, shareholders can determine the broad direction of a company. However, shareholder...

A central issue in corporate governance literature is the extent to which ‘good’ governance practices are universal (one size mostly fits all) or instead depend on country and firm characteristics,...

A considerable proportion of publicly traded corporate bonds comprises bonds of privately held firms (ie, firms whose equity is non-listed and does not trade over the counter). In our paper 'Is it...

Global governance is in crisis. The conventional treaty-based system is struggling to cope with the multiple challenges faced by global society. This failure is evident in various areas, including...

In our paper, ‘Creditor Governance’, we investigate the degree to which large creditors exert influence over borrower investment decisions, and whether creditor-influenced changes in firm policies...

The proportion of women in boardroom has traditionally been low around the world. Over the last decades, several jurisdictions have adopted legislative actions in order to trigger a tangible progress...

Twenty years ago, the first of a series of tremendously influential papers on 'Law and Finance' was published by Rafael La Porta and his colleagues. By putting legal institutions at the centre of...

Because of their pernicious tendency to serve as a vehicle for extracting value from firms, related party transactions (RPTs) have come to epitomize corporate governance ills. The regulation of RPTs...

Financial institutions have become highly reliant on outsourcing core business processes to third-party service providers. In the past two decades, the growth and expansion of outsourcing has allowed...

Compliance is a stunningly hot topic, with companies spending significant resources on it, and probably literally, dozens of conferences on the subject each week.[1] One curious feature of the...

With the adoption of the Action Plan ‘Financing Sustainable Growth’, the European Commission is taking a range of steps towards encouraging listed companies to conduct their business in a more...

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...

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...

Introduction The Financial Reporting Council published its new UK Corporate Governance Code on 16 July 2018, following on from a long Green Paper/White Paper and FRC consultation process. A measure...

Lately, there has been no shortage of scandals involving fraudulent, predatory, and otherwise ethically unacceptable behavior on the part of large financial institutions. Much of this behavior was...

Issuers, investors and regulators are paying increasing attention to corporate sustainability. Commentators have proffered a variety of explanations for this attention ranging from the argument that...

2019 Global Corporate Governance Colloquium Center for Financial Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany 7 - 8 June 2019 Deadline for submissions: 14 September 2018 (at midnight CET) The...

How do securities regulators react to changes in market conditions? Zingales argues in ‘The Future of Securities Regulation’ that after a stock market downturn, regulation and therefore investor...