The process of liberalisation of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development both of its financial markets and the legal institutions which support these. An influential body of recent economic work asserts that a country's 'legal origin'-as a civilian or common law...

More than fifty years before the debate about the contractibility of corporate law in the United States, English and then Australian lawmakers truncated what had been substantial scope for contracting around directors' duties. Legislation imposed mandatory rules concerning conflicts of interest...

This paper analyses a longitudinal dataset on legal protection of shareholders over a 36 year period, 1970-2005 for four advanced countries, UK, France, Germany and the US. It examines two aspects of the legal origin hypothesis - whether shareholder protection is higher in the common law...

This paper explores the relationship between regulation and contracts from the point of view of autopoietic social systems theory. Building on the notions of contract as a structure of governance, and of regulation as a system of rules intended to govern the behaviour of its subjects that...

In the New Property Rights approach the degree of incompleteness of markets is taken independently of the cost of the public ordering and of their efficiency relatively to private orderings. In this approach "public markets", similarly to a Swiss cheese, are either assumed to be non-existent...

The emergence of an international regime of soft law principles and rules to prohibit money laundering by financial institutions and other intermediaries is an important step in reducing systemic risk in the international financial system. This paper analyses the various international...

Traditionally, securities were held, traded, and settled in direct holding systems in which owners of securities were either recorded on the issuer's register or were in physical possession of bearer securities certificates. Today, most-publicly traded securities are recorded electronically on...

The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) provides the statutory framework for the new UK market abuse regime, which became effective on 1 December 2001. The FSMA market abuse regime provides new powers to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to sanction anyone who engages in 'market...