Nowadays we are witnessing multinational corporations (“Multinationals”) growing to be more powerful than certain countries. Joel Bakan perceives this “dramatic rise to dominance [as] one of the remarkable events of modern history” (emphasis added). But is this ‘rise' in fact ‘fall'...

The propensity to disclose information about corporate non-financial performance has grown across Europe as a result both of Regulation no. 1606/2002 and higher market sensitivity to enterprises adopting socially responsible policies. This study starts with a through examination of the...

In 2014, the European Union (EU) passed a corporate social responsibility (CSR) directive that mandates large listed firms to prepare non-financial reports beginning from fiscal year 2017 onward. We examine whether firms within the scope of the directive (hereafter, “treated firms”)...

A new EU Directive represents an important step towards greater corporate accountability: it will require large companies to report on their social, environmental and human rights impacts and the risks their activities pose for third parties. While the circumstances leading to the Directive were...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the European Union’s (EU) latest regulatory principles for environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures. It explains how some of the EU’s member states are ratifying the EU Commission’s directives on ESG reporting by...

In this study we investigate the determinants of financing obstacles using survey data on a sample of around 5000 firms from the euro area countries. This completely new survey - started at the end of 2009 - gives us the opportunity to test whether firm characteristics such as size, age,...

We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990-2009 period. Our empirical results suggest that phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as – unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions – phase-1 remedies...

One of the objectives of patent systems is to disclose information which other agents can build on in further inventions and in their decision-making. While some observers take it as given that real-world patent systems serve this objective, we argue in this article that patent systems are...

The objective of this paper is to discuss and compare the role that different constituencies play in US and EU procedures for merger control. We describe the main constituencies (both internal and external) involved in merger control in both jurisdictions and discuss how a typical merger case...