The statutory protection currently provided by UK law to employees during transfers of undertakings and other restructurings has been criticised on the grounds that it undermines insolvency procedures and interferes with the 'rescue' process. We present an analysis which suggests that granting...

Recent work in both the theory of the firm and of corporate law has called into question the appropriateness of analysing corporate law as ‘merely’ a set of standard form contracts. This article develops these ideas by focusing on property law’s role in underpinning corporate enterprise....

In this paper, I briefly review the motivations for inventive behavior and describe two common incentive systems that harness and encourage such behavior. This review of well-trodden ground is performed only so that the implications of the rise of the networked knowledge economy for the...

This paper looks more closely at the sources of patent growth in the United States since 1984. It confirms that the increase is largely due to US patenters, with an earlier surge in Asia, and some increase in Europe. Growth has taken place in all technologies, but not in all industries, being...

The authors consider the theory and evidence on the propensity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to patent their innovations. Drawing on UK, European and US literature and data sources, they show that small firms are less likely to use patents as a means of protecting their investment...

The current financial crisis has given rise to calls to toughen considerably the codes of corporate governance put in place in many countries to regulate corporate behaviour (e.g. the UK Combined Code). These codes vary slightly in form but tend to contain a mix of non-discretionary regulations...

This paper offers a qualitative, case-study based analysis of hostile takeover bids mounted in the UK in the mid-1990s under the regime of the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers. It is shown that during bids, directors of bid targets focus on the concerns of target shareholders to the exclusion...

We present a model of CSR as a set of mechanisms for aligning corporate behaviour with the interests of society in reducing externalities and promoting a sustainable corporate sector. These mechanisms include voluntary action by companies to go above minimum legal standards, with the aim of...

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...

We test the 'law matters' and 'legal origin' claims using a newly created panel dataset meas-uring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic...