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...

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...

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 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...

Must policymakers seeking to replicate the success of Silicon Valley’s venture capital market first replicate other US institutions, such as deep and liquid stock markets? Or can legal reforms alone make a significant difference? In this paper, we compare the economic and legal determinants of...

Recent theoretical literature has debated the desirability of permitting debtors to contract with lenders over control rights in bankruptcy. Proponents point to the monitoring benefits brought from concentrating control rights in the hands of a single lender. Detractors point to the costs...

The threat of systemic risk in international financial markets necessitates the establishment of universal standards for corporate governance of financial institutions. This paper addresses some important issues and concepts in the governance of multinational financial institutions and why...

We examine the failure determinants for large quoted UK industrials using a panel data set comprising 539 firms observed over the period 1988-93. The empirical design employs data from company accounts and is based on Chamberlain's conditional binomial logit model, which allows for unobservable,...

Law and economics scholarship has recently begun to investigate the role of social norms in shaping actors' incentives. This paper presents empirical findings on the way in which a group of such norms, known collectively as the 'London Approach', guide the resolution of financial distress by...

Law and economics scholarship has contributed greatly to our understanding of corporate insolvency law. This paper provides an overview of this literature. It begins by defining some relevant terminology, and then reviews theories about the goals of insolvency law. It then considers Jackson's...