Wolf-Georg Ringe

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 also not trigger regulatory arbitrage and would avoid deadlock situations in corporate decision-making. Any regulatory responses should then be limited to a facilitative and supportive role. This monograph proceeds as follows: Section 2 traces the recent trend towards increased ESG and sustainability in corporate governance and finance, and in particular documents the rise of investor-led initiatives in this field. Section 3 discusses the merits of such shareholder engagement and makes the case that ESG initiatives pursued by investors are consistent with business realities and conform with market logic of both demand and supply. Section 4 turns to the main advantage of ESG engagement, namely that it increasingly relies on coalitions and team-building between different types of institutional investors. It is presented that these teaming-up strategies have a dual benefit and a double genius in that they give greater support to campaigns, but also serve as an in-built screening mechanism that would exclude the realization of idiosyncratic benefits for individual investors. Sections 5 and 6 develop some regulatory implications and conclude the analysis.

Corporate law and corporate governance have been at the forefront of regulatory activities across the world for several decades now, and are subject to increasing public attention following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance provides the global framework necessary to understand the aims and methods of legal research in this field. Written by leading scholars from around the world, the Handbook contains a rich variety of chapters that provide a comparative and functional overview of corporate governance. It opens with the central theoretical approaches and methodologies in corporate law scholarship in Part I, before examining core substantive topics in corporate law, including shareholder rights, takeovers and restructuring, and minority rights in Part II. Part III focuses on new challenges in the field, including conflicts between Western and Asian corporate governance environments, the rise of foreign ownership, and emerging markets. Enforcement issues are covered in Part IV, and Part V takes a broader approach, examining those areas of law and finances that are interwoven with corporate governance, including insolvency, taxation, and securities law as well as financial regulation. Now in paperback, the Handbook is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource placing corporate law and governance in its wider context, and is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the field.

This is the long-awaited third edition of this highly regarded comparative overview of corporate law. This edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to reflect the profound changes in corporate law and governance practices that have taken place since the previous edition. These include numerous regulatory changes following the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the changing landscape of governance, especially in the US, with the ever more central role of institutional investors as (active) owners of corporations. The geographic scope of the coverage has been broadened to include an important emerging economy, Brazil. In addition, the book now incorporates analysis of the burgeoning use of corporate law to protect the interests of "external constituencies" without any contractual relationship to a company, in an attempt to tackle broader social and economic problems. The authors start from the premise that corporations (or companies) in all jurisdictions share the same key legal attributes: legal personality, limited liability, delegated management, transferable shares, and investor ownership. Businesses using the corporate form give rise to three basic types of agency problems: those between managers and shareholders as a class; controlling shareholders and minority shareholders; and shareholders as a class and other corporate constituencies, such as corporate creditors and employees. After identifying the common set of legal strategies used to address these agency problems and discussing their interaction with enforcement institutions, The Anatomy of Corporate Law illustrates how a number of core jurisdictions around the world deploy such strategies. In so doing, the book highlights the many commonalities across jurisdictions and reflects on the reasons why they may differ on specific issues. The analysis covers the basic governance structure of the corporation, including the powers of the board of directors and the shareholder meeting, both when management and when a dominant shareholder is in control. It then analyses the role of corporate law in shaping labor relationships, protection of external stakeholders, relationships with creditors, related-party transactions, fundamental corporate actions such as mergers and charter amendments, takeovers, and the regulation of capital markets. The Anatomy of Corporate Law has established itself as the leading book in the field of comparative corporate law. Across the world, students and scholars at various stages in their careers, from undergraduate law students to well-established authorities in the field, routinely consult this book as a starting point for their inquiries.

This is the long-awaited third edition of this highly regarded comparative overview of corporate law. This edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to reflect the profound changes in corporate law and governance practices that have taken place since the previous edition. These include numerous regulatory changes following the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the changing landscape of governance, especially in the US, with the ever more central role of institutional investors as (active) owners of corporations. The geographic scope of the coverage has been broadened to include an important emerging economy, Brazil. In addition, the book now incorporates analysis of the burgeoning use of corporate law to protect the interests of "external constituencies" without any contractual relationship to a company, in an attempt to tackle broader social and economic problems. The authors start from the premise that corporations (or companies) in all jurisdictions share the same key legal attributes: legal personality, limited liability, delegated management, transferable shares, and investor ownership. Businesses using the corporate form give rise to three basic types of agency problems: those between managers and shareholders as a class; controlling shareholders and minority shareholders; and shareholders as a class and other corporate constituencies, such as corporate creditors and employees. After identifying the common set of legal strategies used to address these agency problems and discussing their interaction with enforcement institutions, The Anatomy of Corporate Law illustrates how a number of core jurisdictions around the world deploy such strategies. In so doing, the book highlights the many commonalities across jurisdictions and reflects on the reasons why they may differ on specific issues. The analysis covers the basic governance structure of the corporation, including the powers of the board of directors and the shareholder meeting, both when management and when a dominant shareholder is in control. It then analyses the role of corporate law in shaping labor relationships, protection of external stakeholders, relationships with creditors, related-party transactions, fundamental corporate actions such as mergers and charter amendments, takeovers, and the regulation of capital markets. The Anatomy of Corporate Law has established itself as the leading book in the field of comparative corporate law. Across the world, students and scholars at various stages in their careers, from undergraduate law students to well-established authorities in the field, routinely consult this book as a starting point for their inquiries.

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 as a response to market behaviour has many positive effects for the lawmaking process, but may at the same time pose a risk for and undermine global financial stability as a public good. The resulting dynamics may require regulatory intervention: the traditional response has been to promote international harmonization of legal rules with extraterritorial reach as a comparable unilateral response. In contrast to these traditional concepts, the author introduces the benefits that a special resolution regime for financial institutions can bring to the debate arguing that resolution regimes can help introduce market discipline and that threats to market stability can be eliminated where an effective and credible global framework is in place. Section 2 gives an introduction to the notions of regulatory arbitrage and regulatory competition, and provides an analytical framework to analyse the subject matter of this paper. Section 3 takes the debate into the specific field of financial markets regulation and identifies the problems that it creates in this context. This allows Section 4 to discuss the various regulatory answers that regulators traditionally subscribe to. Section 5 then introduces the benefits that a resolution regime for financial institutions can produce if it is designed in the right way. Section 6 concludes.

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 the past several years, this book then provides an evaluation of each from a legal and an economic perspective. Based on several analytical frameworks, the author identifies the elements of equity deconstruction and demonstrates the consequences for shareholders, outside investors, and capital markets. On this basis, the book makes the case for regulatory intervention, based on three different pillars and comprising disclosure, voting right suspension, and ex-post litigation. The book concludes by developing a concrete, comprehensive proposal on how to address the regulatory problem. Overall, this book contributes to the debate about activist investment and the role of shareholders in corporate governance. At the same time it raises a number of important considerations about the role of equity investment more generally.

Wolf-Georg Ringe untersucht die neue gemeinschaftsweit gültige Rechtsform der Europäischen Aktiengesellschaft ('Societas Europaea'). Mit ihr hat der Gemeinschaftsgesetzgeber Ende 2004 ein Instrument geschaffen, dass es europäischen Großunternehmen erstmals erlaubt, eine gemeinschaftsweit einheitliche Unternehmensverfassung zu wählen. Ein besonderer Vorteil der neuen Rechtsform ist die Vereinfachung grenzüberschreitender Restrukturierungen, insbesondere der grenzüberschreitenden Sitzverlegung. Diese Möglichkeit steht Gesellschaften nationalen Rechts bisher noch nicht umfassend zu. Kollisionsrechtlich versucht sich der Gemeinschaftsgesetzgeber im Rahmen der relevanten divergierenden mitgliedstaatlichen Theorien (Sitz- und Gründungstheorie) einer Stellungnahme zu enthalten. Materiellrechtlich ist die ausführliche Regelung der Sitzverlegung einer Societas Europaea (SE) relativ restriktiv ausgefallen: so müssen beispielsweise immer gleichzeitig Sitz und Hauptverwaltung zugleich verlegt werden, was in einem Spannungsverhältnis zu der jüngeren Rechtsprechung des EuGH steht (Überseering, Inspire Art). Außerdem wird den Schutzanliegen von betroffenen Kreisen wie Gläubigern und Aktionären Rechnung getragen. Den Mitgliedstaaten steht es zudem frei, zusätzliche Schutzmaßnahmen zu schaffen. Der Autor untersucht grundlegend aus kollisions- und sachrechtlicher Perspektive, ob das geschaffene Sitzverlegungsregime den Anforderungen an eine genuin gemeinschaftsrechtliche Rechtsform gerecht wird, insbesondere ob es mit den dem EG-Vertrag zugrundeliegenden Grundfreiheiten in Einklang steht.