Oxford Business Law Blog

Some days ago, the World Bank discontinued the Doing Business (DB) report. For nearly twenty years, the DB’s annual report was one of the main drivers of business law reform worldwide, and a top data...

Public markets have undergone dramatic changes in recent years. Not only has the number of publicly traded firms been declining, but the nature of the firms that choose to go public has also changed...

Will crowdfunding ‘democratize’ investing and make startup capital available to a wider range of founders? Our preliminary study suggests that equity crowdfunding is not providing its expected...

Angel investors have a long history as informal investors within the narrow subset of the private equity (PE) market. The first ‘angel investors’ were wealthy individuals who funded expensive...

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...

New research in the intersecting fields of innovation, finance and law, from Japanese, Asian, European and American perspectives is the subject of Security Interests in Intellectual Property (...

What explains the growing number of collisions and collaborations between law and entrepreneurs? How are startups responding? What are some of the implications of these developments? I explore these...

When European banks were hit by financial calamity, a lack of alternative funding arrangements deepened the crisis. Stronger European capital markets would have changed that picture, because savers...

In recent years, digitization and the Internet have turned traditional segments of the financial sector upside down. When it comes to financing a business project or a fancy wedding, fintech...

US bankruptcy, according to many, is failing small businesses. Federal bankruptcy law, it has been thought, provides the exclusive legal mechanism to reorganize a financially distressed business;...

Startup lawyers are lawyers who represent early-stage companies as they seek to raise capital and grow their businesses. In many respects, the work performed by these attorneys resembles the work of...

The first crowdfunding investment offerings in the US include six types of investments: common stock, preferred stock, interest-bearing loans, revenue-sharing arrangements, convertible debt, and...

Immigration has perhaps always been a controversial political issue. Proponents talk about attracting ‘the best and the brightest’, while others worry that immigrants are mostly attracted by welfare...

In this paper, we document a slowdown of entrepreneurial activity following the adoption of fraudulent transfer laws in the United States. Fraudulent transfers are viewed legally in two ways: actual...

The design of bankruptcy law may have a significant impact on people´s access to finance, the asset and capital structure of firms, and the level of innovation and entrepreneurship in a country. For...