Oxford Business Law Blog

In early 2009, with the financial crisis still raging, progressive policymakers successfully passed legislation upending the credit card industry. This legislation precluded card issuers from...

Both practitioners and academics generally have a dim view of dual-class share structures. For example, when Snap Inc. was preparing for its initial public offering (IPO) in 2017, CalPERS and other...

Under the new Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India has a statutory responsibility to collect, maintain, and disseminate data about the new insolvency and...

Remember your last online purchase? Chances are, the price you paid was not set by humans but rather by a software algorithm. Already in 2015, more than a third of the vendors on Amazon.com had...

A keynote policy of UK financial regulation since the financial crisis has been the ‘ring-fencing’ of retail banks into separate and independently operated entities, so-called ‘ring-fenced bodies’ (...

In our paper ‘Director Bankruptcy Experience and Corporate Risk Taking’, we evaluate the extent to which a director’s corporate bankruptcy experience affects the policies their firms follow. We begin...

The European Commission (EC) adopted a legislative proposal in December 2017 for a regulation (Investment Firm Regulation) and a directive (Investment Firm Directive) to amend the current EU...

Cross-border venture capital investments play an important role in the scaling up of high-growth companies. However, when these companies obtain foreign funding, typically from US investors, there is...

Our article entitled ‘The Hidden Dimension of Business Bankruptcy in Australia’ is the first empirically-based analysis of business bankruptcy to be conducted in Australia. It has two principal...

Ensuring sustainability is one of the grand challenges of our times, but nation-states are severely overstrained with this monumental task. Since states’ legislative power is limited, the suitable...

A considerable proportion of publicly traded corporate bonds comprises bonds of privately held firms (ie, firms whose equity is non-listed and does not trade over the counter). In our paper 'Is it...

Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the communications channel by which an increasing number of commercial and financial transactions take place. But already in the 1990s, it was clear that the...

In this post, we provide an overview of the main findings of the latest Report from the Italian financial regulator, CONSOB, on Italian households’ financial choices. The 2018 edition of CONSOB’s...

Blockchain technologies promise to execute tasks that have traditionally been settled by legal institutions. Some providers of such technologies explicitly offer ‘to act as a digital jurisdiction’...

Our paper brings together two areas seemingly far apart in finance ─ the world of sustainable and social finance and the largely unregulated markets in initial coin offerings (ICOs). The UK...

For many financial products, such as loans and insurance policies, companies distinguish between people based on their different risks and returns. However, the ability to distinguish between people...

In the last few years, an ever-increasing number of platforms are launching ICOs (initial coin offerings). But what happens if an insolvent debtor holds tokens and insolvency proceedings are opened?...

It is often said that transactions made on the blockchain are immutable: once the transaction is done, it is done. And in principle they are indeed immutable. Aside from security breaches, changes to...

Large investors often have market power in private equity markets, such as in venture capital, growth capital, or private placements. The conventional wisdom is that powerful investors can flex their...

Although various authorities in the US have repeatedly claimed that they do not wish to over-regulate cryptoassets or to stifle innovation in the space, overlapping regulations produced by a...

On October 18, federal regulators released the largest U.S. insurance group, Prudential Financial, Inc., from enhanced government oversight. Prudential had been the last remaining systemically...