Oxford Business Law Blog

This blog post tackles the problem of defining smart contracts. In particular, it reviews the existing definitions of smart contracts in some of the main laws enacted and scholarly articles published...

For decades, corporate law played a pivotal role in regulating corporations across the United States. Consequently, Delaware, the leading state of incorporation, and its courts played a central part...

This article provides an overview of our current project, which aims to contribute to artificial intelligence (AI) research in law. We are preparing a standardised dataset of 100,000 US court cases...

The stock markets of Hong Kong and Singapore are characterised by companies with concentrated shareholdings. In addition, they routinely attract issuers whose assets and businesses are located...

In February 2017, a water utility FTSE 100 company, Severn Trent, successfully completed the takeover of its supplier Dee Valley Water, for £84m. Prior to the shareholders’ meeting at which the...

Internationally driven secured transactions law reforms and globally harmonized prudential regulation set the normative premises sustaining the creation of credit in modern economies. Under the...

In my latest article, available on SSRN, I discuss the application of Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 ‘on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance based investment products (PRIIPs)’...

In November 2012, the EU Regulation on Short Selling (SSR) was introduced in the European Union. The SSR mandates that short sellers disclose short positions to authorities, beginning at 0.2% and...

Like many other forms of economic regulation, the regulation of competition takes place, for the most part, at the national level. It’s no great surprise that efforts to develop international law in...

Firms rely heavily on the labor markets from which they draw their employees. In our paper, we consider a fundamental aspect of labor markets, namely, their demographics, and study its effect on...

For about 50 years – at least since Texas Gulf Sulphur – the SEC has ordered defendants to disgorge their profits from transactions that violated the securities laws. Despite disgorgement’s long...

Two decades ago, within the blink of an eye, the Asian Financial Crisis pushed many of Asia’s miracle economies to the brink of collapse. In the post-mortem, the proclivity of Asia’s controlling...

An age-old question in international finance is that of what happens to a despotic government’s debts when the despots are vanquished and the good guys take over. Do the good guys have to pay the...

There are important behavioural reasons why financial consumers tend to make suboptimal financial decisions, and financial firms are often in a position to exploit them. So far, however, well-meaning...

The market for corporate control (operating through hostile takeovers) acts as a key corporate governance mechanism to discipline corporate managers. However, the process and substance of the...

Related party transactions (RPTs) exist in most countries, developed as well as developing. RPTs may take place on an ad hoc basis, or routinely in a corporate group structure. Routine RPTs pose...

In a recent European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) Working Paper I take an industrial organization perspective to explain the regulation of related party transactions in German corporate law...

Regulatory compliance. Required filings. Tax returns. Bored yet? The mere idea of following a complex set of government rules is enough to make human eyes glaze over. The task presents itself as the...