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...

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...

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 intersection of insolvency and employment law, stakeholder...

This review paper is a contribution to a symposium on the 'Future of Secured Credit in Europe'. Its theme is the way in which empirical research has shed light on earlier theoretical literature. These findings tend to suggest that the legal institution of secured credit is, on the whole,...

Hostile takeovers are commonly thought to play a key role in rendering managers accountable to dispersed shareholders in the "Anglo-American" system of corporate governance. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the very significant differences in takeover regulation between the two...