Oxford Business Law Blog

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt the global economy, regulators are struggling to find cost-effective mitigation strategies. The goal of such strategies should be simple: reduce the...

A vast literature studies the role of institutions, such as regulation, for economic outcomes. An implicit assumption in many theoretical and empirical studies in the field is that the law is...

Consider the following case: Jerry publishes unlawful content about Newman on Facebook, Elaine shares Jerry’s post, the share automatically turns into a tweet because her Facebook and Twitter...

Can anyone really own virtual tokens, such as Bitcoin, Ether, and Facebook’s anticipated token – the Libra? The advantages offered by these cryptocurrencies stem from their underlying technology – a...

Methodology has not received sufficient attention in the field of comparative law. All too often, comparative legal scholars proceed on the assumption that placing regulatory structures from multiple...

Through choice-of-forum provisions such as arbitration clauses or court selection clauses, contractual parties have the opportunity to determine where and how their disputes should be solved ex ante...

In ‘Choice Theory and the Economic Analysis of Contracts’ I offer an economist’s reaction to Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller’s important book, ‘The Choice Theory of Contracts.’ In this post, I...

Take a look at our full video interview with Prof Horst Eidenmüller about his empirical research on extreme sports sponsoring contracts and their link with inefficient risk-taking by the sponsored...

Surplus is a ubiquitous feature of economic activity. The ubiquity of surplus challenges us to find fair and efficient ways to share resources. This is the surplus problem. In my article, Law and...

In the decade after the global financial crisis 2007–09, financial regulation reforms have been extensive, led at the international level by the Basel Committee of the Bank for International...

A general challenge facing competition authorities in the digital era is learning how to apply the traditional tools of competition policy in multi-sided platform environments. This column argues...

Firms are exposed to exogenous shocks, such as sudden shifts in exchange rates, input and output prices, corporate law, and the tax system. Regulators, financial analysts, and researchers who want to...

Crowdfunding—the aggregation of numerous but modest individual contributions through specialized online platforms—is a relatively new finance method. In the last few years, it has started its...

It has long been argued that strengthening creditor rights facilitates firms’ access to credit financing, leading to larger credit markets and fostering economic growth (La Porta et al. 1997, 1998)...

The era of the US public corporation is in decline. Tectonic shifts in seemingly disparate regions of the corporate landscape are underway. Through the lens of a new theory of the firm, these...

In a recent article I examine whether ‘cultural factors’ substantively influence the creation and evolution of property institutions. For the past several decades, few legal scholars have answered...

Corporate governance structures interact deeply with the political arena through party systems, political orientations of governments and coalitions, votes of stakeholders (workers, shareholders, etc...

In our paper “The Economics of Disclosure and Financial Reporting Regulation: Evidence and Suggestions for Future Research”, Peter Wysocki and I review the empirical literature on the economic...