Oxford Business Law Blog

A vast literature studies the role of institutions, such as regulation, for economic outcomes. An implicit assumption in many theoretical and empirical studies in the field is that the law is...

The escalating debate over corporate purpose is not confined to Western developed economies. Rapidly developing economies like India are similarly grappling with how to define and develop a legal...

With talk of driverless companies and bots substituting for human beings on company boards either in part or completely, the spectre of a future controlled by entities devoid of human beings is upon...

In recent years, corporate scholars and policymakers have devoted a great deal of attention to explore how large institutional investors, mainly mutual funds, lack capabilities and incentives to...

The topic of common ownership has received substantial attention from both academics and policymakers in recent years. Broadly defined, common ownership exists when investors hold partial and...

When institutional investors hire proxy advisors to prepare reports on matters up for vote at the public companies in which they invest, are they interested in acquiring a bottom-line recommendation...

At the turn of the last century, a fantastic characterization of stock exchange efficiency looked to a powerful, supernatural force referred to simply as ‘the market’, which was an oracle of true...

When a company becomes factually insolvent but it is not yet subject to a formal insolvency proceeding, the shareholders—or the directors acting on their behalf—may engage, even in good faith, in...

I. The current policy debate The European Commission will table two main legislative proposals on digital platforms: The Digital Markets Act (DMA) with new rules regarding the behaviour of gatekeeper...

In 2017, Singapore adopted sweeping reforms to its insolvency regime aimed at increasing Singapore’s attractiveness as a regional restructuring hub. Central to these reforms is the transplantation (...

At the very end of July 2020 the Directorate General, Justice and Consumers, of the European Commission published a study it had commissioned from the accounting firm, EY, entitled ‘Study on...

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...

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...

Simply talking corporate America into being more responsible is not enough. It may get corporations to talk the talk, but not to walk the walk. To understand what is wrong with American capitalism...

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...

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...

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...

Capital markets are a powerful instrument to allocate resources from investors to issuers—ie, firms and states. A well-functioning capital market is a key determinant of economic growth as well as of...

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...

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the European Commission’s (Commission’s) science and knowledge service published a report on common shareholding in Europe in September 2020 (the Report). The...

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...