In the last few years law and finance scholars have 'discovered' the usefulness of comparative law. Their studies look at the quantifiable effect that legal rules and their enforcement have on financial development in different countries. Moreover, they link their results with the long- standing...

Following the 1900 congress in Paris, the beginning of the 20th century saw comparative law emerge as a significant discipline. This paper suggests that the early 21st century is seeing the decline, or maybe even the 'end', of comparative law. In contrast to other claims which see the 21st...

In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach "public markets", similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be non-existent...

We draw on a series of in-depth interviews with senior fund managers and senior company executives to explore how different and often-contradictory conceptualizations of institutional investors, their role in the corporate governance process, and their interactions with corporate management, are...

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 analyses the emerging international supervisory regime for banking institutions that operate on a transnational basis. It focuses on the basle framework as an institutional regime of norms and principles that govern international financial relations amongst the g10 countries. This...

The process of legalization and the role of international soft law in developing international banking supervisory standards are extremely important for assessing the feasibility of establishing effective international rules for banking supervision. This paper analyses the concept of...

More than fifty years before the debate about the contractibility of corporate law in the United States, English and then Australian lawmakers truncated what had been substantial scope for contracting around directors' duties. Legislation imposed mandatory rules concerning conflicts of interest...

The process of liberalisation of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development both of its financial markets and the legal institutions which support these. An influential body of recent economic work asserts that a country's 'legal origin'-as a civilian or common law...

This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005 for four advanced countries, UK, France, Germany and the US. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis - whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...