This Research Handbook is a one-stop resource on global capital markets and the laws that regulate them. Focussing primarily on ‘mainstream’ capital markets, and framing them as an ecosystem in which the market players and regulators must co-exist, the Handbook paints a canvas on which key cross-cutting themes are depicted, dissected and discussed. Featuring contributions from leading global experts, the Research Handbook delves into a range of issues including investment products such as equity finance; sustainable finance; fintech; impact investing; private equity. It also provides analysis on institutional and procedural issues such as large and small companies' capital formation, the roles of institutional shareholders and information providers, and the practices and regulation of financial trading markets. International in scope, this Research Handbook will be of great value to scholars and practitioners in the field of financial law. It will also be a go-to source of information for policy makers in the financial markets sphere.

Shareholder inspection rights form an important tool for shareholder protection. They offer shareholders seeking information private access to specific books and records of the company that are otherwise not publicly available. While there has been a discourse on the topic in some jurisdictions such as Delaware (USA), it has not received scholarly treatment at an international level. This Research Handbook seeks to alter that, and signifies the first endeavor to engage in a comprehensive and comparative analysis of shareholder inspection rights across 19 different jurisdictions representing five continents. Themes emerging from the study include the historical evolution of inspection rights, the statutory design of the inspection regime, how inspection rights interact with disclosure norms under securities regulation, and the manner in which inspection rights are actually utilized by shareholders. While there is some commonality among jurisdictions, the larger story is one of divergence, which is understandable since local needs tend to drive the design and operation of the regime. The Research Handbook on Shareholder Inspection Rights is invaluable to academics, scholars, and students working the area of corporate law and governance, legal practitioners working in corporate law and, in particular, shareholder litigation and regulators and government bodies overseeing the corporate sector, including corporate and securities regulators.