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In this chapter, we explore the legal framework of AGMs in seven Member States (Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) of shareholder decision-making rights. We find that, since only a small part of the decision-making rights is harmonized at the European level, there are numerous differences in shareholder rights among national laws. These decision-making rights are usually about the topics director (re-)elections, pay matters, share capital, amendments to articles of association, annual accounts, etc. To be able to conduct empirical research in the remaining chapters, we develop a categorization framework of 15 voting items.

COVID-19 pandemic was a health crisis that plunged the world into economic turmoil due to its resultant national lockdowns across economies which brought business and market activities to a standstill. In order to adapt to ensuing restrictions owing to the pandemic, forge ahead in a new way of living, work and interactions with one another (new normal), digitizing business and market operations is considered a necessary option. Sukuk is an essential Islamic capital market product whose operations involve multiple parties/intermediaries alongside some technical financial, administrative and legal/shariah processes. On this note, this chapter aims to study and examine the need for digitizing and automating sukuk operations and related activities to pave way for innovation, development and better continuity of sukuk market. In conducting the study, a review of literature approach is employed where relevant works on sukuk and fintech were examined. Using content analysis, the chapter explored digitization of sukuk in the Islamic capital market via fintech and blockchain and associated benefits, including peculiar challenges therein. An interview was also conducted to better understand the Wethaq case study. The chapter reveals that digitizing sukuk issuance adds value to sukuk and remedies certain inadequacies associated with sukuk transactions; can increase transparency of underlying sukuk assets and cash flows and can reduce costs due to lesser number of intermediaries. Digitization is the future of sukuk issuance and will promote sukuk well through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.

This paper argues that Charles Reznikoff’s autobiography, Family Chronicle: An Odyssey from Russia to America, presents Jewish law as an ethical alternative to U.S. law. The autobiography illustrates how Jewish law refuses to let social and economic hierarchies compromise its emphasis on truth-finding and the speedy resolution of legal troubles. Family Chronicle tragically portrays the Reznikoff family’s inability to exert equal bargaining power with its landlords, something commercial lease law assumes they can do. Reznikoff’s autobiography suggests that the United States can better realize its democratic principles by revising commercial lease law to reflect the tenant-centered approach of residential lease law.

This chapter explores the impact of the pandemic on Islamic commercial finance and Islamic social finance in a comprehensive manner. The chapter reveals that COVID-19 has provided more opportunities to Islamic social finance than Islamic commercial finance. The beauty of Islamic finance in this regard is reflected as the perception that Islamic finance does not achieve its objective as being a social finance is proved to be false as Islamic finance not only promotes profit maximization, but it has also the potential to achieve social objectives. Islamic commercial finance developments could be slower, but it is anticipated that Islamic social modes of financing will be used widely even by multilateral agencies to assist the communities who need help in this pandemic. The most important lesson one could learn from this pandemic in relation to Islamic finance is that Islamic finance is truly different from conventional finance and as such, it needs a unique legal, regulatory and governance framework to display the true potential of it.

We investigate the interaction of debt covenants and tax accounting on the adoption of Financial Interpretation No. 48 (FIN 48). We examine how firms respond to the potential tightening of covenant slack upon FIN 48 adoption and whether these actions are penalized by creditors and anticipated by equity markets. We find that upon FIN 48 adoption, the majority of sample corporate borrowers increase their tax reserves and reduce equity. Firms close to debt covenant violation were even more likely to increase tax reserves upon FIN 48 adoption; however, the size of the adjustment was relatively smaller, suggesting that the FIN 48 standards limited, but did not eliminate, firms use of discretion in reporting uncertain tax positions to avoid costly covenant violations. For firms near net worth debt covenant violation, the act of decreasing equity upon FIN 48 adoption imposes real economic costs, as the average cost of debt increased by 43 basis points. Finally, we extend prior research on the market response to FIN 48 by showing how the market response to FIN 48 adoption is a function of debt covenant slack and tax aggressiveness. Specifically, the cumulative abnormal return at the FIN 48 exposure draft release date is negative only for tax aggressive firms that are close to debt covenant violation.

Business is any legally permissible economic activity for gain. The first relation between government and business is that government determines by law what are the illegal activities, e.g. fraud, crime, violence. Government is the rule maker.

This chapter addresses the issue of the Global South external debt by mobilizing insights from Modern Monetary Theory, Ecological Economics, and Dependency Theory. It argues that the external debt problem of Southern governments is a reflection of their subordinate economic and monetary status. It shows why the argument of foreign currency shortage often used to explain the need for Southern governments to issue foreign currency debts remains superficial. In contrast to the usual focus on creditors, the chapter highlights the role played by foreign direct investment in the genesis of the chronic external indebtedness of most Southern countries. It argues then that the external debt of the South must be understood holistically not only as a manifestation of the unequal ecological exchange between the North and the South but also as an instrument that has contributed to reproducing and amplifying this pattern. Under these conditions, the cancellation or restructuring of the South's external debt stock and a few other unlikely concessions by the Northern countries will not be enough to abolish the “debt system.” This is an important lesson from the antiimperialist critique of the mid-1970s New International Economic Order (NIEO) agenda that current movements for Southern debt cancellation and Climate Justice would do well to remember.

Purpose: COVID-19 pandemic is among the most important events of the 21st Century. Its global character and the multi-dimensional fallouts it has on communities worldwide further increase the importance of the pandemic. During the period of more than one year since the declaration of the pandemic, the communities failed to provide a lasting solution other than the face masks, social distance, and hygiene. Failure to fight the pandemic with considerable success subsequently raised the topic of revising the policymakers’ previous predictions at the start of the pandemic based on incomplete information. So, the calendar put forward for the pandemic went forward day by day, and the authorities who failed to adopt a prudent approach were obliged to pay increasingly higher costs for their mistakes. In the chapter, the financial and economic effects of the pandemic in selected countries are examined. While examining the policies followed in these countries, in terms of fiscal stimulus packages and monetary expansion packages, it is aimed to shed light on the pandemic experience in the Turkish economy and to develop policy recommendations. Thus the persistence of the pandemic pushes all countries to update their current policies and seek new methods. This chapter aims to examine developed and emerging economies in the covid-19 era that have implemented policies to struggle with the pandemic and whose policy framework can be accessed.

Methodology: To do this we carried out a literature review of the Economic and Fiscal Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic during 2020 and early 2021.

Findings: Countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany are believed to have taken strong measures to minimize the damages on the economy due to the pandemic, while other countries like Russia, India, and Brazil are deemed to have mounded new policies within the framework of their internal dynamics. One should also note that, in addition to the individual efforts of each European country, the European Union has also played a decisive role in the policies of its member states for crisis management institutionally.

The long-term financial stability of hospital systems represents a “grand challenge” in health care. New ownership forms, such as private equity (PE), promise to achieve better financial performance than nonprofit or for-profit systems. In this study, we compare two systems with many similarities, but radically different ownership structures, missions, governance, and merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies. Both were nonprofit, religious systems serving low-income communities – Montefiore Health System and Caritas Christi Health Care.

Montefiore's M&A strategy was to invest in local hospitals and create an integrated regional system, increasing revenues by adding primary doctors and community hospitals as feeders into the system and achieving efficiencies through effective resource allocation across specialized units. Slow and steady timing of acquisitions allowed for organizational learning and balancing of debt and equity. By 2019, it owned 11 hospitals with 40,000 employees and had strong positive financials and low reliance on debt.

By contrast, in 2010, PE firm Cerberus Capital bought out Caritas (renamed Steward Health Care System) and took control of the Board of Directors, who set the system's strategic direction. Cerberus used Steward as a platform for a massive debt-driven acquisition strategy. In 2016, it sold off most of its hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion, leaving hospitals saddled with long-term inflated leases; paid itself almost $500 million in dividends; and used the rest for leveraged buyouts of 27 hospitals in 9 states in 3 years. The rapid, scattershot M&A strategy was designed to create a large corporation that could be sold off in five years for financial gain – not for health care integration. Its debt load exploded, and by 2019, its financials were deeply in the red. Its Massachusetts hospitals were the worst financial performers of any system in the state. Cerberus exited Steward in 2020 in a deal that left its physicians, the new owners, holding the debt.