All jurisdictions supply corporations with legal tools to prevent or punish asset diversion by those, whether managers or dominant shareholders, who are in control. As previous research has shown, these rules, doctrines and remedies are far from uniform across jurisdictions, possibly leading to...

Private ordering enables investors to design firm-specific governance arrangements. Aided by specialized lawyers, sophisticated contracting parties can engage in complex private ordering exercises yielding agency cost-minimizing governance structures. Venture capital ('VC') contracting is a...

A vast literature has examined the contractual technology that venture capital (VC) funds and entrepreneurs deploy in the U.S. to define an agency cost-minimising structure of their relationship, leading many to conclude that U.S. VC contracts are the best real-world solution to the challenges...

This essay first shows how the 1998 Consolidated Act on Financial Intermediation (TUIF) and subsequent reforms strengthened the role of Consob (the Italian S.E.C.). It argues that the TUIF greatly enhanced Consob's powers and role in the Italian securities market. Later reforms went in the same...

This paper assesses how Italian companies have implemented the regulation on related party transactions enacted by Consob in 2010. Companies have been given some degree of freedom in devising their internal codes: they may “opt-up” or “opt-down” from some of the default provisions set...

This is a draft chapter for a forthcoming volume, The Research Handbook on Shareholder Power, edited by Randall Thomas and Jennifer Hill (Cheltenham:Edward Elgar). This chapter describes the experience with activist institutional investors in an apparently unfavorable corporate environment...