The global financial and economic crisis which started in 2008 has had devastating effects around the globe. It has caused a rethinking in different areas of law, and posed new challenges to regulators and private actors alike. One of the emerging issues is the apparent eclipse of boundaries between different legal disciplines: financial and corporate lawyers have to learn how public law instruments can complement their traditional governance tools; conversely, public lawyers have had to come to understand the specificities of the financial markets they intend to regulate. While commentary on...

New investment techniques and new types of shareholder activists are shaking up the traditional ways of equity investment that informs much of our present-day corporate law and governance. Savvy investors such as hedge funds are using financial derivatives, securities lending transactions, and related concepts to decouple the financial risk from shares. This leads to a distortion of incentives and has potentially severe consequences for the functioning of corporate governance and of capital markets overall.
Taking stock of the different decoupling strategies that have become known over...

Regulatory Competition in Global Financial Markets: The Case for a Special Resolution Regime evaluates the power of market pressure on the way financial regulation is made. It argues that the phenomena of arbitrage and competition in financial rulemaking are potentially more problematic than elsewhere. This is linked to the ease of arbitrage on the one hand, and to the risks of deregulation for global financial stability of the other. This monograph demonstrates that regulatory competition in financial markets is a reality and evaluates its merits. Regulatory competition in financial markets...

Investor-led Sustainability in Corporate Governance argues that ESG engagement can be a very powerful driver towards a more sustainability-oriented future in corporate governance. Investor-led sustainability has many advantages compared to a more prescriptive, regulatory approach. For example, a greater focus on investor initiatives would follow a more flexible and dynamic pattern rather than complying with pre-defined criteria that are slow to change. Moreover, investor-promoted assessments are not likely to impair welfare creation in the same way as ill-defined legal standards; they would...