Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2010
When Council Regulation (EC) No 2157/2001 on the Statute for a European Company (Societas Europaea – SE) became effective on 8 October 2004, it offered existing publicly traded companies, for the first time, a choice between competing company laws, namely the national law of the company's home state and the law of the supranational SE. Using an event study methodology, we analyse a unique dataset of publicly traded firms that have announced to re-incorporate under the SE Regulation.
* This article is a thoroughly revised version of an earlier working paper circulated under the title The Societas Europaea: Good News for European Firms (see infra n. 7). We are indebted to Florian Heiss, Klaus Wohlrabe and the participants in the Empirical Economics Research Workshop at the University of Munich. We also thank Jodie Kirshner, participants in Oxford University's conference on ‘Company Law and Economic Protectionism’ and an anonymous referee for their thoughtful comments.