China's rapid growth in the absence of autonomous legal institutions of the kind found in the west appears to pose a problem for theories which stress the importance of law for economic development. In this article we draw on interviews with lawyers, entrepreneurs and financial market actors to...

Law has to be able to respond to new or changing circumstances. This adaptability of the law may be more important than details in the law as such. However, its meaning and its significance have not yet been analysed in detail. Thus, legal adaptability will be examined in this article. It looks...

This Article contains chapters 8-9, 11-13, and the Conclusion of a World Bank-sponsored Report, prepared in December 2006, to the Russian Federal Service on the Securities Market. We discuss the liability under company law of directors, senior company officials, and controlling shareholders of...

Over recent years, a number of regulators have launched proposals to expand the obligation to disclose major share ownership in listed companies. This paper shows that these are not stand-alone developments. Using a unique dataset comprising data from 25 countries over 11 years (1995-2005) and...

Is Chinese commercial law simply a copy of German and other Western commercial laws, a “mystery” that Westerns cannot understand, or an “irrelevance” given the role of culture and politics in China? This article critically discusses these three modes of understanding. It is found that,...

Since the law on market abuse in EU countries has in recent years become predominantly European-based, it makes sense to address this area of law from a European point of view. However, there is, so far, no European case law on the new market abuse regime. This article therefore uses some...

The Judgment of the European Court of Justice (Grand Chamber) of 22 November 2022, ECLI:EU:C:2022:912 in the Joined Cases C-37/20 and C-601/20, WM and Sovim SA v. Luxembourg Business Registers has spurred some strong reactions. According to some, it “will leave fraudsters rubbing their hands...

This paper discusses whether the forthcoming reform of market abuse law, as proposed by the EU Commission in October 2011, may be seen as a ‘revolution' or a mere ‘evolution'. Section 1 explains the topicality of regulating market abuse (ie insider dealing and market manipulation), both in...

This paper analyses the impact of the EU market abuse law on share repurchases. We find that the Member States' previous rules differed considerably, and therefore it can be said that the Regulation on share repurchases has provided uniformity as to the availability of a safe harbor for share...

The seminal paper by La Porta et al. on ‘Law and Finance’ empirically examined whether there is a causal link between high levels of shareholder protection and financial development. Subsequent studies of this ‘Law & Finance School’ also addressed many further legal topics. This chapter...