This article addresses the proposition advanced by academic and press commentators that European corporation law promotes stockholder welfare better than its U.S. counterpart. Those who express that view often point to the stronger rights afforded to stockholders under the laws of the European...

In this Article we submit that the compensation structures at banks before the financial crisis were not necessarily flawed and that recent reforms in this area largely reflect already existing best practices. In Part I we review recent empirical studies on corporate governance and executive pay...

Key points:• This article considers how the recent market turmoil affected national banking systems, thereby prompting state measures;• It describes the remuneration problems shown by the financial crisis: rewards for failure; short-term behaviour; inappropriate design of performance...

After the governance crisis of 2001-2003 and the regulatory response through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the European corporate governance codes, the financial crisis has revealed persistent governance problems in financial institutions relating to executives, non-executives and shareholders. For...

The present paper is inspired by the increased application of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) into several policy areas, such as immigration and employment. The OMC has been lately in the epicenter of numerous academic debates related to the rationalization and the effectiveness of the...

Practitioners and academics have long assumed that financial markets value the deal-specific legal terms of public company acquisition agreements, yet legal scholarship has failed to subject this premise to empirical scrutiny. The conventional wisdom is that markets must value the tremendous...

The composition of the board of directors is considered key for the success of the company. The current approach to compose this board is to provide shareholders and investors with individual information of the skills and experience of (candidate) directors. The information is insufficient to...

Negative risk-decoupling, otherwise known as empty voting, is a popular strategy amongst hedge funds and other activist investors. In short, it is the attempt to decouple the economic risk from the share's ownership position, retaining in particular the voting right without risk. This paper uses...

We examine the political dynamics which led to the codification of the Principles and Standards for sound compensation practices at financial institutions at international (G 20) level and to their subsequent implementation on both sides of the Atlantic. We show that the regulation of bankers'...