Starting from the observation that at the multilateral level shareholder activism is considered as an important aspect of good corporate governance, this paper examines several legal and economic obstacles to institutional investor activism in the EU and in the US. We find that investors in the...

How do we prevent financial institutions from taking excessive risk when the public fisc serves as their ultimate creditor? This is one of the central questions left over after the recent financial crisis and, for the past five years, there has been no shortage of proposed answers. Two of the...

There has recently been considerable interest in the potential adverse effects associated with excessive uncertainty in energy futures markets. Theoretical models of investment under uncertainty predict that increased uncertainty will tend to induce firms to delay production and investment....

This study examines whether mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) leads to capital market benefits through enhanced financial statement comparability. UK domestic standards are considered very similar to IFRS (Bae et al. 2008), suggesting any capital market...

This paper reviews key policy messages and warnings about developments in the run-up to the global financial and economic crisis that began in mid-2007 which are contained in the main publications of the IMF, the OECD and the BIS and discuss issues relevant to strengthening their surveillance...

This paper presents and explains the newly rediscovered and transcribed daily market gold price from 1919-1968 for the world's main gold market during the period, the London Gold Fixing Auction. The paper highlights several novel features previously not discussed in the literature, such as gold...

We analyze the partisanship of Securities and Exchange Commissioners (SEC) and members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (Fed) using the language-based approach of Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Taddy (Econometrica, 2019). The level of partisanship among these regulators is greater than that of...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate how much revenue might feasibly be generated by closing loopholes in the UK Government's stamp duty tax on share transactions. We focus predominantly on preventing abuse of intermediary relief (sometimes known as the market-makers' exemption). We use...

The United States has over 115 different state and federal government agencies regulating financial services, which encompasses banking, securities and insurance firms and products. Various commentators have noted that at least part of the blame for the financial crisis of 2007-2009 in the...

This article reviews the use in the flotation of Standard Life plc of the prospectus passport for cross-border offers of securities within the EU that was introduced by the Prospectus Directive (2003). The Standard Life flotation was a major test for the new law on prospectuses and, overall, it...