Oxford Business Law Blog

Gender Balancing Laws are popular means for regulators to increase the female representation on corporate boards. Norway was among the first countries to introduce a mandatory board gender quota back...

Why don’t we see more regulatory arbitrage? What constrains it? Regulatory arbitrage refers to structuring activity to take advantage of gaps or differences in regulations or laws. Examples include...

Debt restructuring is an issue that has come to prominence in the twenty years since Centros, in large part due to the difficulties faced by companies in the aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial...

In April 2018 the European Commission presented a proposed directive on cross-border mobility which includes a new legal process for cross-border conversion. The JURI committee of the European...

2019 marks the ten-year anniversary for the Spector-decision, where the European Court of Justice determined that when an investor is in possession of inside information while trading, it can be...

In the past 30 years, defaults on corporate bonds have been substantially higher than the historical average. Dividing the years from 1970 to 2016 into two equal periods, the default rate of US...

March 2019 marked the twentieth anniversary of the landmark Centros case. It was the first of three judgments in which the (then) European Court of Justice (the Court) affirmed companies’ freedom of...

The 2008 financial crisis set off a major debate about the role of accounting for financial stability. Politicians, policymakers and commentators were quick to point to fair-value or mark-to-market...

The analysis of corporate governance has been a strikingly one-sided affair. The focus has been almost exclusively on ‘internal’ checks and balances, namely scrutiny of executives by the board of...

As of 2017, 172 of America’s 200 largest companies, ranked by revenue, were publicly traded. Public company dominance of the corporate economy of the United States has existed for decades. There has...

On December 9, 2002, UAL Corporation, which operated as United Airlines, filed for bankruptcy protection, leading to huge losses by UAL’s creditors. Those creditors included UAL’s pensioners when UAL...

The rise of the crypto economy has brought promises and perils to the venture capital industry. By mid-2017, initial coin offerings (ICOs) had surpassed angel and venture capital funding as a more...

We usually think that the stock market provides an accurate valuation of a firm, whether it is a large diversified conglomerate, a tiny focussed firm, a manufacturing company or a utility company. By...

Climate change presents serious implications for development in developing countries. The United Nations Human Development Report in 2016 found that over 1.5 billion people in developing countries...

The most dramatic development in twenty-first century bankruptcy practice has been the increasing use of contracts to shape the bankruptcy process. In our article, we assess—and try to make sense of—...

For the past several years, the US Congress has been considering various versions of a legislative reform that would amend the Bankruptcy Code to facilitate the prompt reorganization of systemically...

In our paper, we empirically study the effect of Chrysler's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on the unit sales of its competitors in the U.S. automotive industry. On the one hand, the demand for the...

The EU Revised Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD II) is currently required to be implemented by 10 June 2019. It seeks to encourage long-term shareholder involvement through increased transparency...

Cryptocurrencies and their potential impact on central banking have sparked a policy debate on addressing their potential risks to the banking and monetary systems. By highlighting the functional...

Many debtholders, whether private households, companies, or states, are caught up in high-interest long-term loans. At the same time, economic developments over the past few years have created a low-...