Oxford Business Law Blog

Executive and non-executive directors with access to private and price-sensitive information have, as insiders, an advantage over other investors when trading in the shares of their firm. Even if...

Two of my recent articles examine securities class action litigation and SEC enforcement against foreign corporations seeking to tap American capital markets (see here and here). To evaluate public...

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...

Corporate law is theoretically rich but historically poor. There is a ‘pre-history’ of corporate law that is prior to the discipline’s historical knowledge, horizon and imagination; a pre-history of...

Venture capital (‘VC’) is widely recognized as a crucial driver of economic growth, job creation, and commercialization of cutting-edge technology. In the Singapore context, the VC industry is...

The financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath had a broad impact on how the financial system is understood to work and how it influences the wider economy. Macroeconomists have highlighted the role...

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...

Debt-based crowdfunding (‘crowdlending’ or ‘peer to peer lending’) is growing as an alternative finance market within the EU. Yet it has many risks for investors. A lack of regulation of the emerging...

In the 1970s and 80s, as major financial institutions grew and diversified their operations, courts and scholars recognized that fiduciary law posed profound challenges for the organizational...

The regulatory requirement for banks to hold capital is related to the safety net afforded by (often implicit) government guarantees. Regulators are also concerned about the possibility of systemic...

As part of a research project on ‘Shareholders’ Duties’, such as inter alia the duties to disclose (e.g. major holdings, engagement policy etc.), and the duty not to abuse rights, this post aims to...

Voting at annual general shareholder meetings (AGMs) has been shown to be valuable. This makes perfect sense as voting gives shareholders a say on important corporate decisions, such as the...

In May 2016 the Insolvency Service issued a consultation on the corporate insolvency framework in the UK (for discussion see Part I and Part 2 of an earlier OBLB blog by this author). This was...

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...

Our recent article, which we co-authored with Angus Chan, examines the main challenges for achieving regulatory convergence and coordination for depositor preference rules and explicit deposit...

How large are the welfare losses associated with inefficient courts? Legal scholars and economists have long grappled with this important question because inefficiencies in the court system are...

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are currently a hot topic in the financial markets. By the end of 2018, issuers are expected to have raised about US$20 billion in ICOs. The annual energy consumption of...

In the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, many banks in the US collapsed and/or had to be bailed out, but Canadian banks sailed through the crisis relatively unscathed. Since then, financial...

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...

Firms are investing significant resources towards sustainable goals that do not necessarily seem to be just about maximizing profits. Is this a good thing? It depends on what their investors want. If...

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...