The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has adopted a revised framework for capital measurement and capital standards (Basel II). A wide range of options for risk assessment allows banks and supervisors to select the most appropriate approach for their operations and financial market infrastructure.

At the close of the twentieth century, U.S. corporate scholarship was dominated by a principal-agent paradigm that assumed that shareholders were the principals or sole residual claimants in public corporations, and also assumed that corporate directors were the shareholders' agents. This approach led many corporate scholars to assume that the proper purpose of the corporation was to maximize shareholder wealth and that the chief economic problem of interest in corporate law was the “agency cost” problem of getting corporate directors to focus on this goal.

There are basic aspects of U.S. corporate law, however, that the principal-agent model cannot explain. These include directors' extensive and sui generis legal powers; the fact that directors control dividends; the device of legal personality; and the open-ended rules of corporate purpose. These corporate law “anomalies” have prompted contemporary economic and legal scholars to begin to move beyond a focus on agency costs and to pay attention to a second economic problem that arises in public corporations: the problem of protecting specific investment. When corporate production requires more than one individual or group to make specific investments, problems of intrafirm opportunism arise if shareholders try to exploit each other's specific investments or try to exploit the specific investments of creditors, employees, customers, and other groups. Board governance, while worsening agency costs, may provide a second-best solution to such intrafirm rent-seeking. This perspective explains many important corporate law “anomalies” that cannot be explained by the principal-agent model.

It also suggests a pressing need to revisit conventional notions of corporate purpose. Focusing on the problem of specific investment suggests that the proper purpose of the public corporation is not maximizing shareholder wealth, but promoting long-term, value-creating economic production under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, in a fashion that provides surplus benefits not only to shareholders but to other groups that make specific investments in corporations as well. This corporate objective is difficult to measure, much less maximize. Nevertheless, it may provide a better gauge of good corporate governance than the simplistic rubric of shareholder wealth.

In its Action Plan ‘Modernising Company Law and Enhancing Corporate Governance in the European Union – A Plan to Move Forward’ of 2003, the European Commission proposed a mandatory disclosure of institutional investors' voting behaviour with regard to their portfolio companies as a medium-term measure. This proposal was evidently inspired by SEC rules mandating voting disclosure of investment companies and investment advisers adopted in the same year.

However, the realisation of the Commission's proposal is far from certain. It has not only met with strong opposition from commentators when it was presented to the public in 2003, but the Commission itself recently launched a consultation process to reassess the necessity and desirability of the medium and long-term proposals of its Action Plan, thereby indicating that it will take the principle of subsidiarity of EC law much more seriously than it has done in the past. At the same time, the UK Government is getting ready to adopt a disclosure rule at national level.

This paper examines the US debate on and experience with institutional investors' mandatory voting disclosure. With the aid of the insights and arguments thereby gathered, it argues that there continues to be a case for a mandatory voting disclosure rule at EC level.

This issue of EBOR presents to a wider audience the papers and proceedings of a symposium on ‘Efficient Creditor Protection in European Company Law’, which took place from 1 to 3 December 2005 at the premises of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, as a joint venture of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians University and the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law. As the organisers of this conference, we were proud and delighted that so many outstanding scholars from Europe and the United States agreed to participate, give presentations, make comments and contribute to the discussions, although we had nothing to offer but a lot of preparatory work, uncomfortable winter travel and the prospect of exchanging some views on questions of corporate law reform in our conference room. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Sciences for its generous financial support of the conference and this publication.

This paper reviews the case for and against mandatory legal capital rules. It is argued that legal capital is no longer an appropriate means of safeguarding creditors' interests. This is most clearly the case as regards mandatory rules. Moreover, it is suggested that even an ‘opt in’ (or default) legal capital regime is unlikely to be a useful mechanism. However, the advent of regulatory arbitrage in European corporate law will provide a way of gathering information regarding investors' preferences in relation to such rules. Those creditor protection rules that do not further the interests of adjusting creditors will become subject to competitive pressures. Legislatures will be faced with the task of designing mandatory rules to deal with the issues raised by ‘non-adjusting’ creditors in a proportionate and effective manner, consistent with the Gebhard formula.

Advances in risk management capabilities should make it profitable for major banks to rely on internal credit ratings to calculate Basel II capital requirements (IRB approach). Firms and, more generally, market participants would benefit from the disclosure of these ratings. Banks, however, have no incentives to make their rating data publicly available. This paper proposes a regulatory framework to efficiently solve this incentive issue. It first shows that there are benefits in requiring the disclosure of internal ratings. In particular, it would reduce the cost of capital for both large and small borrowers while facilitating investor diversification.

To be sure, internal rating disclosure would also have its costs. For example, market volatility may increase, whereas lender-borrower relationships may suffer. This paper argues that it is possible to design a regulatory framework under which the benefits of mandatory rating disclosure clearly outweigh its costs. Banks opting for the IRB approach would have to provide their internal ratings to one of several regional entities. The latter would consolidate the data collected and give each borrower a rating equal to the average of the ratings it gets from its lenders. The average rating would be disclosed to the public unless the borrower has opted for non-disclosure. Relying upon multiple regional entities may cause some uncertainty (a given firm may get diverging average ratings), but it would also reduce moral hazard effects and foster competition in the rating industry.

This article examines the likely impact of the United Kingdom's Company Law Review (CLR) on its system of corporate governance. The CLR recommended that company law should be amended to require companies to pursue ‘enlightened shareholder value’. This would be ensured primarily through a requirement on listed companies to produce an Operating and Financial Review (OFR). The OFR was introduced into law but was recently unexpectedly abolished by the Chancellor. The article examines the theoretical approach taken to corporate governance by the CLR and the way in which the OFR was expected to affect corporate governance. It then asks whether shareholder value would in fact have been enlightened by the OFR, given the institutional context in which it would have operated. While there are considerable grounds for scepticism about whether the OFR would have worked as the CLR expected, it is unfortunate that it was withdrawn because it was an important experiment in disclosure of qualitative information about intangible assets. The article concludes with some thoughts about whether shareholder value could still be enlightened in the absence of a mandatory OFR.

Under the provisions of the Prospectus Directive, the publication of a prospectus for an offer of securities to the public, or an admission of securities to trading on a regulated market, is subject to the prior approval of the prospectus by the competent authority of the issuer's home Member State. This article examines the approval system as envisaged under the Directive. The aim is two-fold. First, the article conceptualises the approval system as a regulatory instrument. By studying the provisions relating to the prior approval in the Prospectus Directive, and by drawing on the literature on regulation, the approval system will be conceptualised as an ex ante enforcement system. Second, the article examines the approval system critically as an investor protection measure and as a risk reduction strategy for issuers. Proceeding on the premise that in order to justify the prior approval, the approval system must not only improve upon the quality of disclosure but that this improvement must matter if considered from the perspective of the recipient of the approved prospectus, the benefits and costs of the prior approval will be assessed for investors and issuers. These two points will be developed hereunder by examining in turn the regulatory nature and the purpose of the approval system.

The EU Financial Markets Dialogue led by the SEC and the European Commission has achieved some notable successes, particularly with respect to the consolidated supervision of financial conglomerates and the development of a plan to achieve convergence in corporate financial reporting. On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a clear ongoing commitment to the dialogue as a key mechanism for the development of efficient and credible regulatory solutions that guarantee effective investor protection and a high level of business efficiency. This paper reports on a two-day roundtable discussion that took place at Cambridge University in September 2005 to explore ways in which the academic community can contribute to this transatlantic debate. Lively discussion between the policy-makers, regulators, market participants and academics who attended the roundtable yielded a number of thematic concerns, which, the paper suggests, could form the basis of a programme for further work. Finally, the paper announces the establishment of a seminar series, to be based in the United Kingdom, on the Transatlantic Financial Services Regulatory Dialogue and invites contributions.

I would like to use (or abuse) my comment on John Armour's thoughtful paper to sketch out a conceptual approach towards legal capital with an emphasis on structure rather than on substantive regulation.

This survey article summarises the findings of four research projects on the venture capital industry in Europe and the role played by legal institutions and the legal framework. A study on patent litigation insurance argues that insurance can create a level playing field for small innovators, but that compulsory insurance can only be justified as a transitory scheme. The second study argues that intermediaries from countries with a better legal tradition will provide more governance and value-added services, even when investing abroad. It also provides supportive empirical evidence based on an extensive questionnaire study. The third project investigates the relationship between venture investments and a widely used legality index in thirty-nine countries, finding that better laws facilitate faster deal screening and origination, lead to a higher probability of syndication and also facilitate board representation of the investors. The final study documents a significant performance gap between the European and the US venture capital industry, but argues that the difference can not be attributed to differences in legal origin.

Since the publication of the Cadbury Code (1992), there has been a rapid international diffusion of corporate governance codes containing recommendations on boards, executive pay, disclosure and investor relations. But there has been little or no scientific evidence to support the recommendations, so it is questionable whether they can be explained by market failures. Instead, based on public choice theory, I propose the alternative hypothesis that the codes reflect rent seeking by institutional investors in a bargaining game with other stakeholders, including investment banks, auditing firms, incumbent owners, managers and employees. I argue that this hypothesis can explain a number of puzzling features about codes, including their remarkable similarity, the ‘one size fits all’ approach and their pattern of diffusion. A study of fifty-two corporate governance codes and a qualitative review of their core contents provide empirical support for the institutional investor hypothesis. The key focus is on empowering boards and making them accountable to minority investors, i.e., capturing the overall control of listed companies. Since it is not clear that these initiatives contribute to overall value creation, an evaluation of the costs of governance is called for.

This article examines the historical, doctrinal and theoretical bases of shareholder rights in British company law. These rights are, and always have been, essentially the product of private bargains, subjected to regulation of various explicit and implicit forms. This legal framework has significant normative advantages: it facilitates the development of innovative and efficient corporate structures. That is demonstrated through empirical evidence and examples from British corporate practice. One key example is how so-called ‘indirect investors’ in a company – the large and economically significant group of people who invest in a company through intermediaries such as nominees and depositaries – can be accommodated within the governance structure of the company, even though they are not themselves shareholders in the company and so are not directly party to its internal governance mechanisms. With this domestic legal background in mind, the article finally addresses and assesses the impact and effect of the proposed EU Shareholder Rights Directive on British company law and practice.

Article 43 EC prohibits not only restrictions on freedom of establishment on the part of the host State but also those restrictions that are attributable to the State of origin. This article focuses on the latter aspect, the prohibition on ‘exit restrictions’, which was at the centre in the European Court of Justice's recent judgment in Marks & Spencer.

This article examines contractual protection of unsecured financial creditors in US credit markets. Borrowers and lenders in the United States contract against a minimal legal background that imposes the burden of protection on the lender. A working, constantly updated, set of contractual protections has emerged in response. But actual use of available contractual technology varies widely, depending on the level of risk and the institutional context. The credit markets sort borrowers according to the degree of the risk of financial distress, imposing substantial constraints only on the borrowers with the most dangerous incentives. At the same time, the contracting practice is sticky and lumpy, never quite managing to conform to the predictions of first generation agency theory. Levels of protection vary with institutional contexts. Exhaustive contracts providing something approaching complete protection against agency costs prove feasible only in relational contexts conducive to ongoing renegotiation over time due to small numbers of lenders operating under reputational constraints. The public bond markets do not hold out such a process context, and accordingly shut out the riskiest borrowers. The larger, less risky firms that do gain access to the bond markets borrow under contracts offering incomplete protection, with the level of protection roughly correlating to the borrower's risk level. This leaves bondholders confronting a residuum of agency costs and relying on secondary protections like monitoring, exit, diversification, and hedging. This has worked reasonably well in practice, subject to an historical exception concerning the risk of high-leverage restructuring. The bond markets searched for two decades for a stable solution to this problem, finally settling on across-the-board contractual protection only in recent years.

US law governing foreign judicial assistance authorises parties to foreign proceedings to obtain discovery in the United States for use in these proceedings. In the past, however, it was unclear whether US courts could grant document discovery for use in foreign courts when the latter could not legally authorise discovery if the documents were located in their own jurisdiction. In Intel v. AMD (2004), the US Supreme Court eventually ruled that there was no such foreign discoverability requirement. This decision could be criticised because it fails to heed international comity. For one thing, the Court dismissed the European Commission's characterisation of the proceedings of the Directorate-General Competition as not being before a foreign tribunal, a characterisation which would have barred the Court from applying the foreign judicial assistance proceedings. For another, obviously, the rejection of a foreign discoverability requirement does not particularly reflect respect for foreign nations' evidence-taking laws. However, as far as the latter criticism is concerned, the Supreme Court should be commended for setting forth a number of factors informed by reasonableness that lower courts could employ to reject transnational discovery requests in specific instances.

The consequences of recent decisions of the European Court of Justice are that the Member States may not impose instant taxation on companies based only on their migration, but the Member States still do so. Secondary EU law provides tax neutrality only for a migrating SE. The prerequisites under which this tax neutrality is granted are so restrictive that their conformity with freedom of establishment is doubtful. As the European Court of Justice does not deny the right of Member States to tax increases in value at the time of realisation, a tax deferral concept might be a future solution.

The article analyses some US federal court decisions which by relying on the so-called revenue rule rejected civil claims of foreign sovereigns against major tobacco companies based on tax losses suffered due to the smuggling of contraband tobacco products into the claimants' territories. The revenue rule deals with the domestic court's jurisdiction to enforce penal, revenue or other public law claims of foreign states. First, the article discusses the alleged rationale and the unclear scope of the globally accepted revenue rule. Then, it turns to the question whether the revenue rule was rightly applied by the courts to the civil claims of the foreign sovereigns. Finally, it questions the alleged rationale of the revenue rule and argues for its abandonment.

Covenants are a means to mitigate the agency problems between borrower and lender that are induced by the allocation of cash flow rights in a debt contract. This comment shows that if covenants could be renegotiated without any transaction costs they could be used to induce efficient behaviour on the part of the borrower and to fully protect lenders. Due to problems of asymmetric information, collective action and hold-up, however, covenants are imperfect. The analysis suggests several ways to improve the functioning of covenants.