Oxford Business Law Blog

The EU’s Fintech Action Plan (more recently, the Digital Finance Strategy) and the Sustainable Finance Action Plan represent important pillars of the current European policy agenda. While the two...

Issuing equity research reports raises interest and encourages trading in a particular stock. Brokers earn commissions on these trades, regardless of the ex-post accuracy of their research. If...

The collapse or distress of international businesses can affect multiple stakeholders, including banks, trade creditors, employees, shareholders, and even entire economies. Conflict between laws,...

Private sector innovation—whether it is fintech, biotechnology, the platformisation of the economy, or other developments—seems, over and over, to be catching regulators by surprise. Financial...

Comparative corporate governance has become a broad research field during the past decades. With the increasing internationalization of law and legal scholarship, the subject has seen a burgeoning...

Standard neoclassical models in finance posit that corporate decisions are made virtually in a vacuum and independently of an individual's social identities. But since Akerlof and Kranton's seminal...

The European Commission published its new Digital Finance Strategy on 24 September 2020. One of its centrepieces is the draft Regulation on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA), designed to provide a...

Shareholder value maximization has been severely criticized in recent years, but it is not clear what, if anything, is to take its place. In a new working paper I review three models of corporate...

It is hard not to notice the increasing number of soft law instruments that have been published in recent years, at least in the field of restructuring and insolvency law. Of course, mere issuance...

The shock suspension by Chinese regulators of Ant Financial’s $37 billion initial public offering points to a tougher and more complex compliance environment for fintech firms going forward. As Ant...

In several common law systems, creditors of corporate debtors enjoy legal protections beyond what their contracts with those companies afford them in the form of vicinity-of-insolvency fiduciary...

How, and when, did the law of American corporate fiduciary duties begin to develop differently? Kershaw shows that the Delaware variant of the business judgment rule emerged in the twentieth century...

Ongoing attempts to infuse Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the practice of law are actively taking place by commercial vendors of LegalTech products and by legal scholars in academic research labs...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is typically assumed as a voluntary initiative rather than a legal mandate. Yet, over the past few decades, the world has witnessed the rise of explicit CSR...

In our recent paper, we explore the potential impact of ESG-related information and of the increase in ESG-compliant investments on the prohibition on insider dealing and the obligation to publicly...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has increasingly become a mainstream business activity, ranging from voluntarily engaging in environmental protection to increasing workforce diversity and...

In 1958, Nobel Laureates Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller controversially claimed that, under certain assumptions, the value of a firm is independent of its capital structure. Their article was a...

New technologies such as the blockchain and artificial intelligence could have profound effects on corporations. Research shows, for instance, that blockchains could be employed to clear and register...

The treatment of defaulting loans has become a major concern for supervisory authorities and bank regulators. During the global financial crisis (GFC), the growth of nonperforming loans (NPLs) was a...