European Company Law requires both closely-held and listed companies to disclose their financial situation (annual accounts) to the general public. The European Court of Justice has recently decided that also competitors of a company are in the position to enforce this obligation. This gives...

In Anglo-American law, fiduciary duty is the core legal concept to address conflicts among directors/managers and shareholders. The concept is developed and constantly refined by courts in the process of adjudication. By contrast, most civil law jurisdictions, including many transition...

When Council Regulation (EC) No 2157/2001 on the Statute for a European Company (Societas Europaea - SE) became effective on 8 October 2004, it offered publicly traded companies, for the first time, a choice between competing company laws, namely the national law of the company’s home state...

This essay takes stock of the corporate governance reform efforts Italian policymakers have engaged in since the beginning of the 1990s. After describing the reform process and its drivers (a concern for Italian equity markets’ attractiveness in an increasingly competitive and global...

In recent years, the emphasis in corporate governance has shifted from board composition, independent directors, separating the position of chairperson and CEO, and establishing board committees to “being in control” and risk management issues. However, the corporate law perspective of...

Corporate law is an arena in which the metaphor of the states as a laboratory describes actual practice, and, for the most part, this is a laboratory that has worked reasonably well. The goal of this paper is to map out over time the diffusion of corporate law reforms across the states. The...

The advancement of their risk management activities makes it profitable for major banks to rely on internal credit ratings to calculate Basel II capital requirements (IRB approach). Firms and, more generally, market participants would benefit from the disclosure of these ratings, as it would...

Proponents of board reforms assume that corporate structures and director-specific provisions matter. This paper argues that reformers have set minimum standards, but failed to take into accounts various trade-offs and regulatory capture effects. It is thus suggested to increase the flexibility...

The fact of a small number of hostile takeover bids in Japan the recent past, together with technical amendments of the Civil Code that would allow a poison pill-like security, raises the question of how a poison pill would operate in Japan should it be widely deployed. This paper reviews the...