Oxford Business Law Blog

The escalating debate over corporate purpose is not confined to Western developed economies. Rapidly developing economies like India are similarly grappling with how to define and develop a legal...

With talk of driverless companies and bots substituting for human beings on company boards either in part or completely, the spectre of a future controlled by entities devoid of human beings is upon...

In recent years, corporate scholars and policymakers have devoted a great deal of attention to explore how large institutional investors, mainly mutual funds, lack capabilities and incentives to...

The topic of common ownership has received substantial attention from both academics and policymakers in recent years. Broadly defined, common ownership exists when investors hold partial and...

At the turn of the last century, a fantastic characterization of stock exchange efficiency looked to a powerful, supernatural force referred to simply as ‘the market’, which was an oracle of true...

I. The current policy debate The European Commission will table two main legislative proposals on digital platforms: The Digital Markets Act (DMA) with new rules regarding the behaviour of gatekeeper...

At the very end of July 2020 the Directorate General, Justice and Consumers, of the European Commission published a study it had commissioned from the accounting firm, EY, entitled ‘Study on...

Simply talking corporate America into being more responsible is not enough. It may get corporations to talk the talk, but not to walk the walk. To understand what is wrong with American capitalism...

Standard neoclassical models in finance posit that corporate decisions are made virtually in a vacuum and independently of an individual's social identities. But since Akerlof and Kranton's seminal...

Shareholder value maximization has been severely criticized in recent years, but it is not clear what, if anything, is to take its place. In a new working paper I review three models of corporate...

In several common law systems, creditors of corporate debtors enjoy legal protections beyond what their contracts with those companies afford them in the form of vicinity-of-insolvency fiduciary...

How, and when, did the law of American corporate fiduciary duties begin to develop differently? Kershaw shows that the Delaware variant of the business judgment rule emerged in the twentieth century...

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Commission’s (Commission’s) science and knowledge service published a report on common shareholding in Europe in September 2020 (the Report). The...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is typically assumed as a voluntary initiative rather than a legal mandate. Yet, over the past few decades, the world has witnessed the rise of explicit CSR...

Statement made by Prof. John C. Coffee, Jr. at the ECGI Policy Workshop on 'Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance' (11 November 2020). The European Commission retained Ernst &...

In 1958, Nobel Laureates Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller controversially claimed that, under certain assumptions, the value of a firm is independent of its capital structure. Their article was a...

New technologies such as the blockchain and artificial intelligence could have profound effects on corporations. Research shows, for instance, that blockchains could be employed to clear and register...

In recent weeks, the Oxford Business Law Blog has been featuring a series of blog posts covering the recently released ‘Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance’ prepared by...

Business history and theory reflect a tension between public and private conceptions of the corporation. This tension and conceptual ambiguity lay close to the surface of The Modern Corporation and...

There is at present a considerable risk that the European Commission and Parliament will fail to appreciate the severity of the criticism that the recent sustainability and corporate governance...