Oxford Business Law Blog

In many markets, large institutional investors like BlackRock and Vanguard own significant stakes in most, if not all, horizontal competitors. Legal scholars have suggested that this pattern of...

Recent studies have purported to show that the wave of board destaggering that has occurred over the past fifteen years has resulted in value destruction amounting to roughly $350 billion or 6.5% of...

While directors’ independence has become a common feature of governance all around the world, the definition of “independence” and the role of independent directors are not universally defined: they...

Behavioral ethics has evidenced that through a combination of deliberate and non-deliberate processes, people may end up behaving unethically with limited awareness of the true ethicality of their...

My recent book Ombudsmen and ADR: a comparative study of informal justice in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) is about how ordinary people experience part of the informal justice system. My focus is...

Investor protection has been an ideal in corporate and securities law ever since the early 20th century, when Berle and Means famously highlighted shareholder vulnerability in modern public...

In our paper, ‘Creditor Governance’, we investigate the degree to which large creditors exert influence over borrower investment decisions, and whether creditor-influenced changes in firm policies...

Takeover regimes in Europe have been under persistent scrutiny by the public, politicians, and market participants. Sometimes, that is just the nature of the game: Takeovers create winners and losers...

The proportion of women in boardroom has traditionally been low around the world. Over the last decades, several jurisdictions have adopted legislative actions in order to trigger a tangible progress...

A project of the British Academy - 'The Future of the Corporation’ reached a major milestone on November 1, 2018 with the public discussion of a framework and supporting papers. The project is led by...

In our paper, we consider how the legal and policy challenges associated with related-party transactions (RPTs) in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) differ from those associated with privately owned...

Because of their pernicious tendency to serve as a vehicle for extracting value from firms, related party transactions (RPTs) have come to epitomize corporate governance ills. The regulation of RPTs...

In the face of scandals in the corporate sector, such as the collapse of BHS in 2016 and Carillion in 2018, UK policy-makers are responsive to introducing reforms in company law. Indeed, the Business...

Robust capital markets require highest levels of transparency in accounting. Therefore, several jurisdictions have established independent audit regulators. In India, three major audit scandals have...

There is a growing sense among academics and practitioners that common ownership—where two firms are at least partially owned by the same investor—is on the rise among publicly-held U.S. firms and...

Women remain underrepresented at all levels of corporate leadership, including among CEOs and board directors. Women make up 5% of CEOs in the Fortune 500, even less in the S&P 500. Women do...

Financial institutions have become highly reliant on outsourcing core business processes to third-party service providers. In the past two decades, the growth and expansion of outsourcing has allowed...

Blockchain technology could reshape the economic institutions of capitalism, to borrow the title of a celebrated book by Oliver Williamson. In a recent paper, I deal with contractual agreements that...

Compliance is a stunningly hot topic, with companies spending significant resources on it, and probably literally, dozens of conferences on the subject each week.[1] One curious feature of the...

With the adoption of the Action Plan ‘Financing Sustainable Growth’, the European Commission is taking a range of steps towards encouraging listed companies to conduct their business in a more...

The purpose of our paper ‘Shareholders’ Rights in Agency Conflicts: Selected Issues in the Transatlantic Debate’ (2018) 42 Delaware Journal of Corporate Law 569 is to provide the reader with a...