When things go wrong, it is always good to find someone to blame. As the credit crisis started to unfold in 2007, credit rating agencies (“CRAs”) emerged as the villain – or scapegoat, one might say – for commentators and regulators alike. To sum up, observers accused CRAs of doing a...

From a macroeconomic perspective, the historical evolution of trade and commerce has been closely entangled in a two-way or paradoxical relationship with the evolution of laws, in which one is inextricably linked to the other and both mutually influence each other. At the microeconomic level,...

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw an apparent change in language in public discourses characterised by the rise of so-called “essentially oxymoronic concepts”, i.e., mainly oxymora and paradoxes. In earlier times, these rhetorical figures of speech were largely reserved for the...

The need for a legal framework that explains a decentralized system is compulsory to understand whether regulation could be useful and effective. Previous academic frameworks did not manage to explain the intimate development and success of a decentralized cryptocurrency system interpreting the...

This article gives an overview of the development of the disaster relief law within the international society. Attached to the article is a copy of a report from the United Nation of the Secretary-General of 1984 with draft to a Convention on expediting the delivery of emergency assistance,...

The decade since the financial crisis has witnessed a proliferation of various ‘light touch' financial restructuring techniques in the form of so-called pre-insolvency proceedings. These proceedings inhabit a space on the spectrum of insolvency and restructuring law, somewhere between a pure...

Over the past five years, the renewable energy sector has experienced an unprecedented boom in terms of investment and technological development, due to growing recognition of the role it will play in combating climate change, ensuring energy security and sustainably meeting rising energy...

This paper studies the effects of regulation on economic growth and the relative size of the informal sector in a large sample of industrial and developing countries. Along with firm dynamics, informality is an important channel through which regulation affects macroeconomic performance and...