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Articles 1 - 30 of 223
Full-Text Articles in Law
The Administrative State, Financial Regulation, And The Case For Commissions, Kathryn Judge, Dan Awrey
The Administrative State, Financial Regulation, And The Case For Commissions, Kathryn Judge, Dan Awrey
Faculty Scholarship
Administrative law is under attack, with the Supreme Court reviving, expanding, and creating doctrines that limit the authority and autonomy wielded by regulatory agencies. This anti-administrative turn is particularly alarming for financial regulation, which already faces enormous challenges stemming from the dynamism of modern finance, its growing complexity, and fundamental contestability. Yet that does not mean that defending the current regime is the optimal response. The complexity and dynamism of modern finance also undercut the efficacy of established administrative procedures. And the panoply of financial regulators with unclear and overlapping jurisdictional bounds only adds to the challenge. Both these procedural …
Financial Inclusion, Cryptocurrency, And Afrofuturism, Lynnise E. Pantin
Financial Inclusion, Cryptocurrency, And Afrofuturism, Lynnise E. Pantin
Faculty Scholarship
As a community, Black people consistently face barriers to full participation in traditional financial markets. The decentralized nature of the cryptocurrency market is attractive to a community that has been historically and systematically excluded from the traditional financial markets by both private and public actors. As new entrants to any type of financial market, Black people have increasingly embraced blockchain technology and cryptocurrency as a path towards the wealth-building opportunities and financial freedom they have been denied in traditional markets. This Article analyzes whether the technology’s decentralized system will lead to financial inclusion or increased financial exclusion. Without reconciling the …
Passive Exit, Joshua Mitts
Passive Exit, Joshua Mitts
Faculty Scholarship
In recent years, securities lending — making shares available for borrowing by short sellers who “sell first and buy later” — has been an object of increasing regulatory attention. Securities lending is linked to the growth of passive investing because large, buy-and-hold passive investors are among the largest lenders of portfolio securities. But relatively little is understood about the relationship between securities lending and passive investing. In this Article, I show how securities lending allows passive investors to generate revenue from a decline in the value of their investment portfolios in addition to borrowing fees determined by demand from the …
The Logic And Limits Of The Federal Reserve Act, Lev Menand
The Logic And Limits Of The Federal Reserve Act, Lev Menand
Faculty Scholarship
The Federal Reserve is a monetary authority subject to minimal executive and judicial oversight. It also has the power to create money, which permits it to disburse funds without drawing on the U.S. Treasury. Since 2008, it has leveraged this power to an unprecedented extent. It has rescued teetering financial conglomerates, purchased trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities, and opened numerous ad hoc lending facilities to support ordinary businesses, nonprofits, and municipalities.
This Article identifies the causes and consequences of the Federal Reserve's expanded footprint by recovering the logic and limits of its enabling act. It argues that to understand …
Money And The Public Debt: Treasury Market Liquidity As A Legal Phenomenon, Lev Menand, Joshua Younger
Money And The Public Debt: Treasury Market Liquidity As A Legal Phenomenon, Lev Menand, Joshua Younger
Faculty Scholarship
The market for U.S. government debt (Treasuries) forms the bedrock of the global financial system. The ability of investors to sell Treasuries quickly, cheaply, and at scale has led to an assumption, in many places enshrined in law, that Treasuries are nearly equivalent to cash. Yet in recent years Treasury market liquidity has evaporated on several occasions and, in 2020, the market’s near collapse led to the most aggressive central bank intervention in history.
This Article pieces together what went wrong and offers a new account of the relationship between money issue and debt issue as mechanisms of public finance. …
Stress Testing During Times Of War, Kathryn Judge
Stress Testing During Times Of War, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
In the spring of 2009, the United States was mired in the greatest recession it had faced since the Great Depression. In March, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to 6,594.44, a total decline of 53.4 percent from its peak in the fall of 2007. The official unemployment rate was over 9 percent and still trending upward, eventually exceeding 10 percent. With the support of Congress, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and other financial regulators had launched an array of initiatives to contain the fallout of what had become a global financial crisis. These interventions, including a massive recapitalization …
The Input Fallacy, Talia B. Gillis
The Input Fallacy, Talia B. Gillis
Faculty Scholarship
Algorithmic credit pricing threatens to discriminate against protected groups. Traditionally, fair lending law has addressed such threats by scrutinizing inputs. But input scrutiny has become a fallacy in the world of algorithms.
Using a rich dataset of mortgages, I simulate algorithmic credit pricing and demonstrate that input scrutiny fails to address discrimination concerns and threatens to create an algorithmic myth of colorblindness. The ubiquity of correlations in big data combined with the flexibility and complexity of machine learning means that one cannot rule out the consideration of protected characteristics, such as race, even when one formally excludes them. Moreover, using …
Credit, Crises And Infrastructure: The Differing Fates Of Large And Small Businesses, Todd Baker, Kathryn Judge, Aaron Klein
Credit, Crises And Infrastructure: The Differing Fates Of Large And Small Businesses, Todd Baker, Kathryn Judge, Aaron Klein
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay sheds new light on the importance of credit creation infrastructure in determining who actually receives government support during periods of distress, and who continues to benefit after the acute phase of a crisis and the government’s formal support programs come to an end. The pandemic revealed, and the government’s response accentuated, meaningful asymmetries in the capacities of small and large businesses to access needed funding.
At first glance, it would seem that small businesses benefitted more than large ones from the government’s pandemic-support programs, as more government funds flowed into small businesses. Yet closer inspection of the range …
The Banker Removal Power, Da Lin, Lev Menand
The Banker Removal Power, Da Lin, Lev Menand
Faculty Scholarship
The Federal Reserve (“the Fed”) can remove bankers from office if they violate the law, engage in unsafe or unsound practices, or breach their fiduciary duties. The Fed, however, has used this power so rarely that few even realize it exists. Although major U.S. banks have admitted to repeated and flagrant lawbreaking in recent years, the Fed has never removed a senior executive from one of these institutions.
This Article offers the first comprehensive account of the banker removal power. It makes four contributions. First, drawing on a range of primary sources, it recovers the power’s statutory foundations, showing that …
Cleaning Corporate Governance, Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Eric L. Talley
Cleaning Corporate Governance, Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.
We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding …
Federal Corporate Law And The Business Of Banking, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks
Federal Corporate Law And The Business Of Banking, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks
Faculty Scholarship
The only profit-seeking business enterprises chartered by a federal government agency are banks. Yet there is barely any scholarship justifying this exception to state primacy in U.S. corporate law.
This Article addresses that gap. It reinterprets the National Bank Act (NBA) – the organic statute governing national banks, the heavyweights of the financial sector – as a corporation law and recovers the reasons why Congress wrote this law: not to catalyze private wealth creation or to regulate an existing industry, but to solve an economic governance problem. National banks are federal instrumentalities charged with augmenting the money supply – a …
Why Supervise Banks? The Foundations Of The American Monetary Settlement, Lev Menand
Why Supervise Banks? The Foundations Of The American Monetary Settlement, Lev Menand
Faculty Scholarship
Administrative agencies are generally designed to operate at arm’s length, making rules and adjudicating cases. But the banking agencies are different: they are designed to supervise. They work cooperatively with banks and their remedial powers are so extensive they rarely use them. Oversight proceeds through informal, confidential dialogue.
Today, supervision is under threat: banks oppose it, the banking agencies restrict it, and scholars misconstrue it. Recently, the critique has turned legal. Supervision’s skeptics draw on a uniform, flattened view of administrative law to argue that supervision is inconsistent with norms of due process and transparency. These arguments erode the intellectual …
The Federal Reserve And The 2020 Economic And Financial Crisis, Lev Menand
The Federal Reserve And The 2020 Economic And Financial Crisis, Lev Menand
Faculty Scholarship
This Article provides a comprehensive legal analysis of the Federal Reserve's response to the 2020 economic and financial crisis. First, it examines the sixteen ad hoc lending facilities that the Fed established to fight the crisis and sorts them into two categories. Six advance the Fed's monetary mission and were designed to halt a run on financial institutions. Ten go beyond the Fed's traditional role and are designed to directly support financial markets and the real economy. Second, it maps these programs onto the statutory framework for money and banking. It shows that Congress's signature crisis legislation, the CARES Act, …
An Efficiency Analysis Of Defensive Tactics, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz
An Efficiency Analysis Of Defensive Tactics, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz
Faculty Scholarship
For thirty five years, courts and scholars have divided over the effects of defensive tactics in the market for corporate control. Strong defensive tactics locate authority to accept a hostile bid in the target’s board. The board can bargain for a higher takeover price than uncoordinated shareholders could realize but high takeover prices may reduce shareholder returns by reducing the likelihood of receiving a bid. The Delaware Courts themselves disagree. The Delaware Chancery Court would locate ultimate decision authority in the target’s shareholders, while the Supreme Court, by permitting strong defensive tactics, allocates extensive power to the target’s board. Though …
Fedaccounts: Digital Dollars, John Crawford, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks
Fedaccounts: Digital Dollars, John Crawford, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks
Faculty Scholarship
We are entering a new monetary era. Central banks around the world – spurred by the development of privately controlled digital currencies as well as competition from other central banks – have been studying, building, and, in some cases, issuing central bank digital currency (“CBDC”).
Although digital fiat currency is one of the hottest topics in macroeconomics and central banking today, the discussion has largely overlooked the most straightforward and appealing strategy for implementing a U.S. dollar-based CBDC: expanding access to bank accounts that the Federal Reserve already offers to a small, favored set of clients. These accounts consist of …
The Healthcare System And Pandemics: Where Is The Market Failure?, Sophia S. Helland, Edward R. Morrison
The Healthcare System And Pandemics: Where Is The Market Failure?, Sophia S. Helland, Edward R. Morrison
Faculty Scholarship
Barak D. Richman and Steven L. Schwarcz argue that healthcare providers played a central – and failing – role in stemming the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Analogizing to the financial crisis of 2008, they view our healthcare system as a collection of providers, each maximizing returns to its own stakeholders in a laissez-faire regulatory environment that ignored the essential interconnectedness of providers. Because neither hospitals nor regulators were attuned to this interconnectedness, our healthcare system was unprepared for the pandemic, resulting in a reduced standard of care. Just as Dodd-Frank and related legislation view financial institutions as part of …
Preparing Legal Frameworks For Environmental Disasters: Practical Considerations For Host States, Brooke Guven, Perrine Toledano, Lise Johnson
Preparing Legal Frameworks For Environmental Disasters: Practical Considerations For Host States, Brooke Guven, Perrine Toledano, Lise Johnson
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications
Projects in the extractives sector carry risks of lasting, and sometimes irreversible, damage to the environment. Nonetheless, these projects are important for accelerating the economic development of host countries. Governments seeking to mitigate the adverse effects of foreign investment often face pushback from investors that are unwilling to change their practices in order to avert environmental disaster. This report sets forth certain steps that host-governments can take during the pre-investment, operation, and enforcement phases of extractives projects to provide financial and other protection in the context of environmental disasters associated with private sector investments.
Upon comparative review of five Case …
Driver For Contactless Payments, Ronald J. Mann
Driver For Contactless Payments, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
As a consumer, my primary experience with cash before the virus was standing in checkout lines observing the sluggish pace of cash transactions in front of me. Like so many things in our lives, the advent of the virus has changed the situation markedly. From the earliest days of infection, it has been far more unsettling to observe cash transactions knowing that the virus persists on paper and metal surfaces for days.
The dynamic that has driven the choices merchants offer in face-to-face retail transactions will change as well. Driven by the private exigencies of the retail environment, the last …
The New Mechanisms Of Market Inefficiency, Kathryn Judge
The New Mechanisms Of Market Inefficiency, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
Mechanisms of market inefficiency are some of the most important and least understood institutions in financial markets today. A growing body of empirical work reveals a strong and persistent demand for “safe assets,” financial instruments that are sufficiently low risk and opaque that holders readily accept them at face value. The production of such assets, and the willingness of holders to treat them as information insensitive, depends on the existence of mechanisms that promote faith in the value of the underlying assets while simultaneously discouraging information production specific to the value of those assets. Such mechanisms include private arrangements, like …
Restructuring Vs. Bankruptcy, Jason Roderick Donaldson, Edward R. Morrison, Giorgia Piacentino, Xiaobo Yu
Restructuring Vs. Bankruptcy, Jason Roderick Donaldson, Edward R. Morrison, Giorgia Piacentino, Xiaobo Yu
Faculty Scholarship
We develop a model of a firm in financial distress. Distress can be mitigated by filing for bankruptcy, which is costly, or preempted by restructuring, which is impeded by a collective action problem. We find that bankruptcy and restructuring are complements, not substitutes: Reducing bankruptcy costs facilitates restructuring, rather than crowding it out. And so does making bankruptcy more debtor-friendly, under a condition that seems likely to hold now in the United States. The model gives new perspectives on current relief policies (e.g., subsidized loans to firms in bankruptcy) and on long-standing legal debates (e.g., the efficiency of the absolute …
A Better Financing System? The Death And Possible Rebirth Of The Presidential Nomination Public Financing Program, Richard Briffault
A Better Financing System? The Death And Possible Rebirth Of The Presidential Nomination Public Financing Program, Richard Briffault
Faculty Scholarship
In the spring of 1974, the 31-year-old junior Senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., published a law review article in which he decried the traditional system of privately financed election campaigns. Private financing, Senator Biden contended, “affords certain wealthy individuals or special interest groups the potential for exerting a disproportionate influence over both the electoral mechanism and the policy-making processes of the government.” Moreover, Biden urged, private funding poses an obstacle to the candidacies of “individuals of moderate means” and so was at odds with the “concept of American democracy [that] presumes that all citizens, regardless of access to …
Innovation Versus Encrustation: Agency Costs In Contract Reproduction, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Innovation Versus Encrustation: Agency Costs In Contract Reproduction, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
This article studies the impact of exogenous legal change on whether and how lawyers across four different deal types revise their contracts’ governing law clauses in order to solve the problem that the legal change created. The governing law clause is present in practically every contract across a wide range of industries and, in particular, it appears in deals as disparate as private equity M&A transactions and sovereign bond issuances. Properly drafted, the clause increases the ex ante economic value of the contract to both parties by reducing uncertainty and litigation risk. We posit that different levels of agency costs …
Bankruptcy’S Role In The Covid-19 Crisis, Edward R. Morrison, Andrea C. Saavedra
Bankruptcy’S Role In The Covid-19 Crisis, Edward R. Morrison, Andrea C. Saavedra
Faculty Scholarship
Policymakers have minimized the role of bankruptcy law in mitigating the financial fallout from COVID-19. Scholars too are unsure about the merits of bankruptcy, especially Chapter 11, in resolving business distress. We argue that Chapter 11 complements current stimulus policies for large corporations, such as the airlines, and that Treasury should consider making it a precondition for receiving government-backed financing. Chapter 11 offers a flexible, speedy, and crisis-tested tool for preserving businesses, financing them with government funds (if necessary), and ensuring that the costs of distress are borne primarily by investors, not taxpayers. Chapter 11 saves businesses and employment, not …
For Coöperation And The Abolition Of Capital, Or, How To Get Beyond Our Extractive Punitive Society And Achieve A Just Society, Bernard E. Harcourt
For Coöperation And The Abolition Of Capital, Or, How To Get Beyond Our Extractive Punitive Society And Achieve A Just Society, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
In hindsight, the term "capitalism" was always a misnomer, coined paradoxically by its critics in the nineteenth century. The term misleadingly suggests that the existence of capital produces a unique economic system or that capital itself is governed by economic laws. But that's an illusion. In truth, we do not live today in a system in which capital dictates our economic circumstances. Instead, we live under the tyranny of what I would call "tournament dirigisme": a type of state-directed gladiator sport where our political leaders bestow spoils on the wealthy, privileged elite.
We need to displace this tournament dirigisme with …
Building A Law-And-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond The Twentieth-Century Synthesis, Jedediah S. Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman
Building A Law-And-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond The Twentieth-Century Synthesis, Jedediah S. Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman
Faculty Scholarship
We live in a time of interrelated crises. Economic inequality and precarity, and crises of democracy, climate change, and more raise significant challenges for legal scholarship and thought. “Neoliberal” premises undergird many fields of law and have helped authorize policies and practices that reaffirm the inequities of the current era. In particular, market efficiency, neutrality, and formal equality have rendered key kinds of power invisible, and generated a skepticism of democratic politics. The result of these presumptions is what we call the “Twentieth-Century Synthesis”: a pervasive view of law that encases “the market” from claims of justice and conceals it …
Why The Fed Should Issue A Policy Framework For Credit Policy, Kathryn Judge
Why The Fed Should Issue A Policy Framework For Credit Policy, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
The Federal Reserve has long used policy frameworks to both explain and inform its policymaking. These policy frameworks typically explain what the Fed is seeking to achieve in a given domain and how it plans to achieve its desired aims. Two prominent examples are the Fed’s use of Bagehot’s dictum when acting as a lender of last resort and its monetary policy framework issued in 2012 and revised in 2020. In both instances, the framework provides a foundation for informed debate among Fed policymakers, Congress, and the public, enhancing both efficacy and accountability. Since the onset of the Covid crisis, …
Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls: Fiduciary Duties In Venture Capital Backed Startups, Sarath Sanga, Eric L. Talley
Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls: Fiduciary Duties In Venture Capital Backed Startups, Sarath Sanga, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
Venture-capital-backed startups are often crucibles of conflict between common and preferred shareholders, particularly around exit decisions. Such conflicts are so common, in fact, that they have catalyzed an emergent judicial precedent – the Trados doctrine – that requires boards to prioritize common shareholders' interest and to treat preferred shareholders as contractual claimants. We evaluate the Trados doctrine using a model of startup governance that interacts capital structure, corporate governance, and liability rules. The nature and degree of inter-shareholder conflict turns not only on the relative rights and options of equity participants, but also on a firm's intrinsic value as well …
Executive Underreach, In Pandemics And Otherwise, David E. Pozen, Kim Lane Scheppele
Executive Underreach, In Pandemics And Otherwise, David E. Pozen, Kim Lane Scheppele
Faculty Scholarship
Legal scholars are familiar with the problem of executive overreach, especially in emergencies. But sometimes, instead of being too audacious or extreme, a national executive's attempts to address a true threat prove far too limited and insubstantial. In this Essay, we seek to define and clarify the phenomenon of executive underreach, with special reference to the COVID-19 crisis; to outline ways in which such underreach may compromise constitutional governance and the international legal order; and to suggest a partial remedy.
Long-Term Bias, Eric L. Talley, Michal Barzuza
Long-Term Bias, Eric L. Talley, Michal Barzuza
Faculty Scholarship
An emerging consensus in certain legal, business, and scholarly communities maintains that corporate managers are pressured unduly into chasing short-term gains at the expense of superior long-term prospects. The forces inducing managerial myopia are easy to spot, typically embodied by activist hedge funds and Wall Street gadflies with outsized appetites for next quarter’s earnings. Warnings about the dangers of “short termism” have become so well established, in fact, that they are now driving changes to mainstream practice, as courts, regulators and practitioners fashion legal and transactional constraints designed to insulate firms and managers from the influence of investor short-termism. This …
Why Financial Regulation Keeps Falling Short, Dan Awrey, Kathryn Judge
Why Financial Regulation Keeps Falling Short, Dan Awrey, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
This article argues that there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of finance and current approaches to financial regulation. Today’s financial system is a dynamic and complex ecosystem. For these and other reasons, policy makers and market actors regularly have only a fraction of the information that may be pertinent to decisions they are making. The processes governing financial regulation, however, implicitly assume a high degree of knowability, stability, and predictability. Through two case studies and other examples, this article examines how this mismatch undermines financial stability and other policy aims. This examination further reveals that the procedural rules …