Oxford Business Law Blog

From a functional law and economics perspective, the recent European restructuring directive (the ‘Directive’) brings both welcome innovations and multiple pitfalls. Its final text bears the traces...

In the past years, legal scholarship on technology matters has become ubiquitous. Topics such as self-driving cars, predictive policing or discriminatory profiling are only a few examples of trending...

Corporate bankruptcies constitute an important mechanism for the economy to purge itself of obsolete firms and allocate their constituent parts to more productive uses. This process of reallocation...

The consumer credit market for low-income households in the United States is characterized by high interest rates, harsh default terms, and exotic fee schedules with low upfront fees and outsized...

Our forthcoming Article in the Harvard International Law Journal (Spring/Summer 2020) addresses an important but understudied topic of relevance to academics from a wide range of disciplines who...

The widespread use of virtual currencies and other crypto assets may lead to problems that have been well-known for centuries in private law. The media reveal on an almost daily basis numerous cases...

The rise and fall of The We Company IPO bubble is one of those events that, like the subprime mortgage bubble that preceded the financial crisis, calls for an examination of market structures that...

The market for open-end and closed-end ordinary or alternative funds—Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) and Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs)—has...

Through choice-of-forum provisions such as arbitration clauses or court selection clauses, contractual parties have the opportunity to determine where and how their disputes should be solved ex ante...

As discussed in an earlier post, private ordering theories assume that the threat of a bad reputation incentivizes merchants to act honestly. This sort of governance by reputation, however, requires...

Trade relationships have gained abundant political momentum and media coverage in the last decade. The enduring Brexit saga is a case in point. However, this blogpost intends to adopt a broader,...

Foreign anti-corruption laws present a puzzle: why would the government of one country care to prevent corruption in another? Such laws impede the business activities of the country enacting them in...

Private ordering theorists put a great deal of weight on reputation to enforce honest behavior among market participants. They assume that the fear of getting a bad reputation and consequently being...

Rarely out of the headline news, market manipulation has always been a permanent fixture of securities markets. Even the earliest experiences of a modern-style stock exchange in the 17th century...

The hugely successful Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment (the Cape Town Convention) and its current Protocols for aircraft equipment, railway rolling stock and space assets...

Regulation, however necessary, is a cost to industry. RegTech, which encompasses uses of technology to automate or improve compliance and supervision, has emerged as a potential catalyst in recent...

What good can a corporate insolvency regime do in the modern economy? The question bears asking because the environment in which distressed companies find themselves is so markedly different from the...

For founders of companies, appealing to funders can be everything – and that often means projecting a masculine image. In a recent article, we coined the term ‘venture bearding’ to describe this...