Law and economics scholarship has contributed greatly to our understanding of corporate insolvency law. This paper provides an overview of this literature. It begins by defining some relevant terminology, and then reviews theories about the goals of insolvency law. It then considers Jackson's...

Must policymakers seeking to replicate the success of Silicon Valley’s venture capital market first replicate other US institutions, such as deep and liquid stock markets? Or can legal reforms alone make a significant difference? In this paper, we compare the economic and legal determinants of...

English corporate insolvency law has been reshaped by the Enterprise Act 2002. The Act was intended to ‘to facilitate company rescue and to produce better returns for creditors as a whole’. Administrative receivership, which placed control of insolvency proceedings in the hands of banks, is...

The past decade has seen intense academic debates over possible explanations for the different systems of corporate ownership and control that exist in developed economies. Yet the role of bankruptcy as a mechanism of corporate governance has received relatively little attention. Furthermore,...

Private equity, characterized by firms operating as privately held partnerships organizing the acquisition and 'taking private' of public companies, is currently dominating the business news due to deals growing rapidly in number and size. If the trend continues unabated, the 1989 prediction by...

Recent initiatives in a number of countries have sought to promote entrepreneurship through relaxing the legal consequences of personal bankruptcy. Whilst there is an intuitive link, relatively little attention has been paid to the question empirically, particularly in the international context....

Core institutions of UK corporate governance, in particular those relating to takeovers, board structure and directors' duties, are strongly orientated towards a norm of shareholder primacy. Beyond the core, in particular at the inter-section of insolvency and employment law, stakeholder...

A popular perception is that administrative receivers and their appointors hold 'too much' power in relation to troubled companies. Consideration of this issue is timely, because insolvency law is currently under review. We argue although the law's formal structure is imbalanced, this can...

We test the 'law matters' and 'legal origin' claims using a newly created panel dataset meas-uring legal change over time in a sample of developed and developing countries. Our dataset improves on previous ones by avoiding country-specific variables in favour of functional and generic...

A number of recent national and EU initiatives have sought explicitly to encourage innovative firms and venture capital finance. In keeping with the policy debate, this paper focuses explicitly on the role of law and lawyers in facilitating venture capital: that is, both supply by investors, and...