Oxford Business Law Blog

Institutional ownership has grown tremendously over the last decades, rising to more than 70% of US public firms. The composition of institutional ownership has also changed, with a remarkable growth...

Could public law uncertainty pose a problem for private ordering in the financial sector, not to mention other contexts? In a recent paper in the Journal of Corporate Law Studies, I examine the...

In my recently published working paper titled ‘Developing Securities Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa: Does it Matter?’, I revisit the debates on the utility of stock markets in sub-Saharan Africa. I...

Corporate collapses not only make for dramatic headlines, but cost economies billions of dollars and millions of jobs in addition to destroying communities, people’s lives, and pensions. Beyond such...

Banks became major participants in US securities markets twice in the past century—during the 1920s and after the mid-1990s. Both times, banks with ‘universal banking’ powers originated risky loans...

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the (further) harmonization of insolvency laws pertaining to credit institutions was firmly in the crosshairs of EU regulators and policy makers. The principal arguments...

Covering unwelcome uncertainties of the future, yet inherently uncertain and ambiguous by themselves, material adverse change/effect (‘MAC’) clauses have evolved into important risk-allocation...

A remarkable wave of bankruptcy reforms has washed over the MENA region, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia. News headlines have heralded these reforms as a great boon in particular to the thousands of...

The exposition of the law of fiduciary accountability has been negligently disintegrating for some time. I say negligently because the numerous departures from principle that presently agitate the...

For a long time, economists have been avoid discussing the term ‘culture’. The main reasons for this are that culture does not fit well with the rational agent theory of neoclassical economics, is...

Founded in Germany in 1999, Wirecard AG (‘AG’ is a public limited company formed in Germany) operated in the digital payment segment of the FinTech sector. The shares of Wirecard were listed in the...

In the history of international monetary and payment systems, very few developments have witnessed the same breadth and intensity of change in a short period of time as cryptoassets. Over the past...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted normal life and triggered massive economic slowdowns. In the United States, consumer spending has dropped dramatically and unemployment temporarily hit the highest...

Research into legal reasoning has long been the exclusive purview of legal theorists, despite the central role that legal reasoning plays in real life. However, the recent surge of interest in legal...

In an earnings conference call with investors in 2008, Edward J Shoen, chief executive officer and chairman of U-Haul International, Inc., lamented that the Avis Budget Group, Inc., its main...

With the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an unprecedented shock in worldwide supply and demand caused by the imposition of various lockdown measures to prevent human-to-human...

My recent paper titled ‘Law and Regulation for a Crypto-Market: Perpetuation or Innovation?’ looks at the importance of the law in a crypto-market and recognises that the market is a legal construct...