Investor empowerment for sustainability

The transition to a sustainable economy currently involves a fundamental transformation of markets and market actors. This paper makes the case for investor empowerment as the main tool towards achieving greater sustainability in capital markets. This trust in institutional investors is grounded in various recent developments both on the supply side and the demand side of financial markets, and also in the increasing tendency of institutional investors to engage in common ownership. The need to build coalitions among different types of asset managers or institutional investors, and to convince fellow investors of any given initiative, can then act as an in-built filter helping to overcome the pursuit of idiosyncratic motives and supporting only those campaigns that are seconded by a majority of investors. In particular, institutionalized investor platforms have emerged over recent years as a force for investor empowerment, serving to coordinate investor campaigns and to share the costs of engagement. ESG engagement has the potential to become a very powerful driver towards a more sustainability-oriented future. Any regulatory activity should then be limited to a facilitative and supportive role

Bank governance

According to a common narrative, the failure of banks in the financial crisis reflected poor corporate governance practices, as well as inadequate prudential regulatory safeguards. Yet it turns out that the ‘best’ governance practices according to ordinary standards were the ones that did worst during the financial crisis. In the period leading up to the financial crisis, it was believed that regulation would cause banks to internalize the costs of their activities, meaning that what maximized bank shareholders’ returns would also be in the interests of society. Consequently, large banks used the same governance tools as non-financial companies to minimize shareholder-management agency costs, namely independent boards, shareholder rights, the shareholder primacy norm, the threat of takeovers, and equity-based executive compensation. Unfortunately, such tools had the adverse effect of encouraging bank managers to take excessive risks. Consequently a significant rethink about the way in which banks are governed is required

Brexit and Corporate Citizenship

The UK’s recent vote for Brexit has sparked a fierce debate over the implications for the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in the rest of the EU. So far, however, there has been relatively little discussion of the implications of Brexit for legal persons—that is, corporate citizens of the EU, which may also be profoundly affected by consequent changes. The ECJ’s 1999 decision in Centros made clear that the freedom of establishment protects the entitlement of corporate persons formed in one EU Member State to carry on their business in another Member State. Since then, many entrepreneurs in continental European countries have chosen to form companies in the UK, while still carrying on their business in their home country. What will the consequences of Brexit be for such companies

The costs of separation: friction between company and insolvency law in the single market

Corporate mobility and choice of law within the EU has dominated much of the academic writing in European company law over the last decades. What has not yet received much attention is the way in which national company law interacts with and depends on features of the national legal system outside of company law. In this article we explore this interaction and its relevance for coherent national regulatory systems. Using the regulatory framework for companies in the ‘vicinity of insolvency’ as an example, we show how choice of company law can create both regulatory gaps and multiplication of legal requirements, as private international law rules are applied inconsistently across Europe. More importantly, however, we show that even consistent application of conflicts rules would fail to resolve these problems due to cross-doctrinal interdependence within any national legal system. We conclude that this is a design flaw in the way EU law deals with the increasingly international reach of corporations, and discuss possible paths for resolving or mitigating this issue

Computing weighted solutions in ASP: representation-based method vs. search-based method

For some problems with many solutions, like planning and phylogeny reconstruction, one way to compute more desirable solutions is to assign weights to solutions, and then pick the ones whose weights are over (resp. below) a threshold. This paper studies computing weighted solutions to such problems in Answer Set Programming. We investigate two sorts of methods for computing weighted solutions: one suggests modifying the representation of the problem and the other suggests modifying the search procedure of the answer set solver. We show the applicability and the effectiveness of these methods in reconstructing weighted phylogenies for Indo-European languages. We also compare these methods in terms of computational efficiency; the experimental results show that the search-based method is better