Summary

This book explores the relationship between law and corporate finance. Corporate finance theory seeks to understand how incorporated firms address the financial constraints that affect their investment decisions by using varied financial instruments that give holders different claims on the firm's assets. Recent scholarship in this area explores precisely how legal mechanisms affect corporate finance and the development of financial markets. The legal environment is crucially important in explaining the choices that companies make about their capital structure. The book examines the key elements of the legal environment relating to corporate finance in the UK. This evolving environment has just undergone a remarkable period of far-reaching change. This was driven in part by the desire of the UK government to modernise its domestic company law, and in part by policy choices at the EU level which rely heavily on the adoption of new regulation to promote closer integration of European financial markets. In this book, Eilis Ferran provides a detailed analysis of the technical issues arising from the new UK and European law on corporate finance, and combines this with exploration of the broader policy framework and with cutting edge theoretical and empirical research.