To what extent is EU company law harmonized? This article first makes the point that little progress has been made in the direction of company law uniformity within the EU. It then argues that, even leaving aside the question of whether it would be desirable to have a uniform EU company law, that outcome is simply impossible to achieve, due to interest group resistance and the variety in national meta-rules. Yet it concludes that, in a narrow meaning, European company laws have indeed been harmonized: European Member States company laws fit together, which may well be what harmonization, not only etymologically, is all about.

In this article we use put-call parity to show that ambiguity about ownership played a role in medieval businessmen's efforts to circumvent the Catholic Church's usury restrictions. That ambiguity created fertile ground for a financial innovation, the triple contract, that allowed some merchants to accomplish a kind of regulatory arbitrage. We also show that medieval clerics and merchants appear to have had at least an intuitive grasp of put-call parity, and that this insight shaped the Catholic Church's approach to medieval business contracts, and usury, nearly five centuries before put-call parity was described in the scholarly literature.

The shadow banking system is the one that conducts credit, maturity and liquidity transformation outside regular banking mechanisms. Chinese practices largely fit into this concept. However, unlike their foreign peers, Chinese shadow banking institutions have been intertwined into a complex whole and have achieved credit intermediation usually through wealth management products, often using the problematic asset-pool model. They are also substantially influenced by the unique political economic dynamics in China, such as the rigid financial licensing regime and credit policy control. Both the supply and demand ends of funding have provided those activities with new features, for instance, the P2P lending marketplaces and local government financing vehicles. Chinese government agencies have interplayed responsively and proactively with the market via rulemaking and enforcement, in particular recently, with the aim to fix loopholes, level the playing field and limit regulatory arbitrage. However, further efforts are imperative in order to develop moderate and appropriate regulation and draw clearer legal boundaries.

After the global financial crisis, systemic risk regulation has taken centre stage. Many consider hedge funds a potential threat to financial stability. Regulating hedge funds, however, is necessarily a transnational challenge because no national government alone can effectively control the systemic risks affecting its economy. This article takes the example of hedge funds for a case study of emerging transnational regulation. After an introduction to hedge funds and the reasons for regulating them, it considers the possible elements of a transnational regulatory regime for hedge funds: transnational industry self-regulation, including such induced by the government, regulatory competition between government regulators, and harmonisation of government regulation. The main conclusions are: self-regulation cannot substitute fully for government regulation in controlling systemic risks caused by hedge funds. Equally, regulatory competition tends to undercut systemic risk regulation. Effective transnational regulation can only be accomplished through harmonisation of government regulation. Such harmonisation is likely to arise if regulation is needed to control systemic risk in global financial markets.

After a slow start, the European Company (Societas Europaea – SE) has become increasingly popular. Besides documenting the growth of this new company type, we examine whether firms choose to incorporate in the SE corporate form because they engage in ‘legal arbitrage’ by exploiting differences in legal rules between jurisdictions. We specify a number of hypotheses on particular legal arbitrage motives. To validate our hypotheses, we use a broad telephone survey among SE users in Germany as well as a simple country-level regression model based on a unique, hand-collected dataset on SE incorporations. We find strong evidence that firms use the SE to mitigate the effect of mandatory codetermination rules. Establishing a one-tier board structure (in jurisdictions that impose a two-tier structure on their national public companies) and taking advantage of the SE's mobility for tax purposes also seem to be driving SE formations. By contrast, our analysis fails to support the suggestion that firms use the SE to shop for the most favourable national company law to fill the gaps in the SE Regulation.