Abstract 

Governments moved rapidly at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic to offer generous packages of relief to businesses in a bid to avoid mass bankruptcies. Was there a good case for intervening? Were interventions well-designed to achieve policymakers’ goals? How might the design of these interventions have been improved, so as to deliver relief at lower cost, or to better allocate the costs of relief? These are questions that warrant sustained scholarly investigation, with a view to holding governments to account for the decisions made in the Covid-19 emergency, and to informing analogous decision-making processes in other crises, including those with which policymakers are already having to grapple. In this seminar, Kristin van Zwieten will present some interim results from one project exploring these questions ('‘Covid-19, public policy and commercial law’, funded by Oxford University’s Covid-19 Rapid Research Fund), including a new sole-authored paper (‘Mid-crisis restructuring law reform in the United Kingdom’) and work-in-progress on bail-outs (with Horst Eidenmueller, Oren Sussman and others) and on bail-ins (with Oren Sussman and John Vella).

Paper 

The paper can be found here.

Practicalities 

This event will be a hybrid event. The seminar will take place in Roeterseiland campus (REC) building A, room number A3.01 (Seminar Room on the 3rd floor), and will also be streamed online via Zoom. 

The Zoom link will be specified in the registration confirmation email upon registration for the event.

About the speaker 

Kristin van Zwieten is a Professor of Law and Finance in the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford, Gullifer Fellow at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and a Research Member of the ECGI. She teaches and researches in corporate bankruptcy law, and is editor of Goode on Corporate Insolvency Law (5th ed, 2018), and co-editor of Commentary on the European Insolvency Regulation (OUP, 2nd ed 2022). Kristin is a consultant for the World Bank’s Insolvency and Debt Resolution team.

About ACLE

The Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics (ACLE) is a joint initiative of the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality interdisciplinary research at the intersection between law and economics.