Prior to the global financial crisis which began in 2007, corporate governance reforms of the preceding thirty years had promoted a shareholder-value based model of management for which there was little historical precedent. The underlying legal model of the firm retained a vestigial sense of...

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...

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...

This paper explores the scope for synthesis between economic and systemic approaches to the understanding of legal evolution. The evolutionary and epistemic branches of game theory predict that stable norms will emerge when agents share common beliefs concerning future states of the world....

We review the different regulatory mechanisms which have been used in the UK context to promote gender equality in employment over the past decade, including legal enforcement based on claimant-led litigation, collective bargaining, pay audits, and shareholder pressure. Evidence is drawn from...

We analyse a recently developed leximetric dataset on Indian labour law over the period 1970 to 2006. Indian labour law is seen to be highly protective of workers' interests by international standards, particularly in the area of dismissal regulation. We undertake a time-series econometric...

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...

This paper investigates the importance of managerial capital to involuntary insolvency and acquisition in UK small and medium-sized companies. Given that small businesses are informationally opaque and lack detailed financial data, the role of non-financial factors such as managerial capital has...

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...