Oxford Business Law Blog

In nearly all countries, the regulation of Mobile Financial Services (‘MFS’) falls to the local Central Bank. If you take any issue to a central bank, you are likely to receive a regulation developed...

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)...

Financial regulatory institutions are at the centre of intensive debates surrounding the regulatory tools to supervise financial firms and markets. There is also an important and growing body of...

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...

Twenty-five years ago, UK industry was reeling from a string of corporate collapses whose names still resonate: Polly Peck, Coloroll, BCCI, and, of course, Maxwell. Those failures put the UK on a...

In two of the most prominent regional groupings in the world today, the age of heavy dependency on bank financing is now on the decline. Prompted by two different financial crises, namely the 1997...

Roughly a year ago, UK voted to leave the EU. Notwithstanding the publication of a White Paper by the UK Government, as well as of various sector-specific reports by the House of Lords’ EU Committee...

(Spoiler: if the scholarship is any guide, the answer is, pretty much, no). In 2009, Lord Adair Turner charged that: ‘An underlying assumption of financial regulation in the US, the UK and across the...

Introduction On 1 June 2017 the European Commission and Italy reached an agreement ‘in principle’ on the recapitalization of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS). A mere week later, the Single...

Previous research on shareholder voting has placed most of the emphasis on the role of institutional shareholders. In our recent study, Managerial Reliance on the Retail Shareholder Vote: Evidence...

Way before the 2008 financial crisis, high-profile cases against directors such as the Equitable Life Assurance Society v Bowley [2003] BCC 829, caused the realisation that directors are under...

The edited collection, The Changing Landscape of Corporate Law in New Zealand (The Centre for Commercial and Corporate Law, Inc, 2017), draws together New Zealand and international contributors who...

Law is full of vague standards; legally relevant facts are frequently unclear; sanctions and damages are often uncertain; and the likelihood of detection is rarely known precisely. In our forthcoming...

Can firms freely choose their place of incorporation and thus the applicable company law? And is it also possible that a firm can subsequently reincorporate in another country, with the effect of a...

The corporate governance spotlight, at least in some circles, has often been on directors and shareholders. Today, the classic problems of some holding ‘other people’s money’, or the ‘separation of...

Boards of directors, all over the world, are connected. Directors simultaneously sit on different boards and firms share directors with other firms. A substantial amount of literature has shown that...

Over the last two decades, the framework for international financial regulation has emerged as a primary example of how contemporary international law works in the absence of familiar trappings of...

In a new paper, Criminally Bad Management, I take on the problem of the relationship between managers of large corporations and crime, and pursue an argument that, perhaps surprisingly, leads to a...

The ‘one-share one-vote principle’ is one of the most fundamental rules in modern corporate law. However, in reality, controlling shareholders often obtain voting rights in excess of their economic...