Core institutions of UK corporate governance, in particular those relating to takeovers, board structure and directors’ duties, are strongly orientated towards a norm of shareholder primacy. Beyond the core, in particular at the intersection of insolvency and employment law, stakeholder...

The institutions of productive systems are structured by mutual interests and relative power. Securing mutually beneficial cooperation in production requires resolving distributional differences. These objectives are secured in liberal economic theory by the working of markets which mediate the...

Legal origins theory suggests that law reform, strengthening shareholder and creditor rights, should enhance financial development. We use recently created datasets measuring legal change over time in a sample of 25 developing, developed and transition countries to test this claim. We find that...

A popular perception is that administrative receivers and their appointors hold 'too much' power in relation to troubled companies. Consideration of this issue is timely, because insolvency law is currently under review. We argue although the law's formal structure is imbalanced, this can...

The legal origins hypothesis is one of the most important and influential ideas to emerge in the social sciences in the past decade. However, the empirical base of the legal origins claim has always been contestable, as it largely consists of cross-sectional datasets which provide evidence on...

The past decade has seen intense academic debates over possible explanations for the different systems of corporate ownership and control that exist in developed economies. Yet the role of bankruptcy as a mechanism of corporate governance has received relatively little attention. Furthermore,...

The characterisation of a security interest as 'fixed' or 'floating' has generated much litigation in English courts. This is because a floating charge is subordinated by statute to other claims in the debtor's insolvency, whereas a fixed charge is not. This paper uses the example of the...

We investigate the relation between long run takeover performance and board share ownership in the acquiring company for a sample of 142 UK takeovers completed between 1985-95. We find evidence of a non-linear relationship both between board ownership and takeover profitability, and between...

In this study we provide evidence of cross-sectional dependence of bidder-shareholder wealth and target’s board characteristics. More specifically we provide evidence that the percentage of non-executives, the board size, the stock holdings of executives, and the other directorships held by...

The Major Projects Agreement (MPA) is a framework agreement designed to improve performance in large mechanical and electrical engineering projects. It is built on integrated team working and includes the trade union as a partner in strategic, organizational and employment decisions. The...