Ringe on Regulatory Competition in Corporate Law in the European Union

Wolf-Georg Ringe, Professor of International Commercial Law at the Copenhagen Business School, has posted a paper on charter competition in European Union on SSRN (“Corporate Mobility in the European Union – A Flash in the Pan? – An Empirical Study on the Success of Lawmaking and Regulatory Competition”). The paper is available here. The official abstract reads as follows:

This paper discusses new data on regulatory competition in European company law and the impact of national law reforms, using the example of English company law forms being used by German start-ups. Since 1999, entrepreneurs have been allowed to select foreign legal forms to govern their affairs. The data show that English limited companies have been very popular with German entrepreneurs in the first years of the last decade, but also document a sharp decline from early 2006 onwards. This decline casts doubt over the claim that the German company law reform from November 2008 had ‘successfully fought off’ the use of foreign company forms. Moreover, by contrasting the German data with the corresponding developments in Austria, the paper further demonstrates that the latter jurisdiction sees a similar decline without having reformed its company law. Instead of exclusively relying on law reform as the causal reason for declining foreign incorporation numbers, the paper offers a number of alternative or complementary explanations for the striking developments. The findings are important for our understanding of (defensive) regulatory competition and successful lawmaking.