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Chapter   7, by Celine Gainet, entitled “Controlling Shareholders’ Fiduciary

Duties Owed to Minority Shareholders – A Comparative Approach: the United

States and France”, examines the duties, direct and indirect, that controlling share-

holders have towards minority shareholders. Whereas controlling shareholder’s rights

are quite considerable, their duties by contrast tend to be very limited. This chapter 

shows that a balance between controlling shareholders’ rights and duties is needed and

analyzes the equilibrium developed in two legal systems: American common-law and

French civil law. Whereas controlling shareholders seem to be assigned more duties

in France than in the US, enforcement rules and case laws act to mitigate this fact.

Chapter  8 by Douglas Cumming, Gael Imad’Eddine and Armin Schwienbacher,

entitled “Harmonized Regulatory Standards, International Distribution of Invest-

ment Funds and the Recent Financial Crisis,” considers for the first time the impact

of fund regulation on the international distribution of investment funds. The authors

study the role of the 2001 UCITS Directive of the European Union, put in place tomitigate fraud and promote investor confidence throughout the Union. The authors

examine the impact of UCITS on international distributions of European invest-

ment funds over the 2002–2009 period. The data examined indicate that the UCITS

regulatory structure has significantly facilitated cross-border fund distributions,

though UCITS has had less success in facilitating distributions among smaller 

fund promoters. Also, UCITS funds, especially UCITS equity funds, are found to

have lost some of their advantages in enhancing cross-border distributions during

the recent financial crisis. Finally, the authors record a growing interest in UCITS

outside Europe, notably in Asia, in recent times.Chapter  9, by Annalisa Fabretti, Stefano Herzel, entitled “Active Management

of Socially Responsible Portfolios,” considers the problem of an investor who

wishes to allocate her wealth reflecting socially responsible (SR) criteria. The

reduction in the investment set opportunity that this involves produces a cost for 

the investor which they call the “cost of sustainability”. The investor is aware

that the financial performance of actively managed SR portfolios may be better or 

comparable to those of conventional portfolios. For this reason, the investor decides

to entrust her wealth to a portfolio manager able to produce accurate forecasts of SR

asset returns. The investor’s task is then threefold: (a) hiring a manager who canoffset the cost of sustainability; (b) setting a bonus to compensate the manager for 

the investment restriction; (c) attracting only the best and more motivated managers

to the task. They devise a theoretical solution to these problems and apply their 

results to data from the S&P500 firms which are screened by KLD scores.

Chapter  10, by Stefano Herzel and Marco Nicolosi entitled “A Socially Respon-

sible Portfolio Selection Strategy”, proposes a new theoretical methodology to

integrate Socially Responsible (SR) standards into the process of investment

decisions. They use SR scores of companies in the S&P500 and in the Domini

Social Index (DSI) to define the level of SR of a portfolio. They model this as alinear combination of the SR scores of the single stocks with coefficients given by

the portfolio’s weights. Portfolios are formed that minimize the tracking error from

the DSI whilst at the same time improving the SR measure. The analysis of the

performances of the portfolios show that the improvement of the SR is usually

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