New Research Project - The Law and Finance of Related Party Transactions: A Comparative Analysis

The quality of corporate governance is a key component of asset allocation. In countries characterized by concentrated ownership, minority shareholder expropriation, also known as tunneling, is the main concern from the perspective of outside investors. Tunneling can be the outcome of a number of expropriation techniques. A common way to extract value from the controlled corporation is for the dominant shareholder to engage in transactions with it at favourable terms (so-called related party transactions).

In this research project, co-directed with Professor Tobias Tröger (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt) and generously funded, among others, by SAFE Frankfurt and ECGI, Professor Luca Enriques will bring together top legal and finance scholars to reflect upon the role of dominant shareholders in listed firms, tunneling control as a key component to enhance capital market development, and the content and effectiveness of reform efforts undertaken in various jurisdictions to tackle related party transactions. Confirmed contributors to the project, who will meet in Oxford for an authors workshop and will present their work at a conference in Frankfurt on October 20-21, 2017, are Hanna Almlöf (Linköping University), Jan Andersson (Stockholm University), Marcello Bianchi (OECD), Jens Dammann (University of Texas) Paul Davies, Jesse Fried (Harvard), Zohar Goshen and Curtis Milhaupt (Columbia Law School), Assaf Hamdani (Hebrew University, Geneviève Helleringer, Sang Yop Kang (Beijing University), Kon Sik Kim (Seoul National University), Woochan Kim (Korea University Business School), Amir Licht (IDC Herzlyia), Alessio M. Pacces (Erasmus University, Rotterdam), Mariana Pargendler (FGV, Sao Paulo), Ed Rock (University of Pennsylvania), Rossella Signoretti (Consob), and Kristin Van Zwieten.