Law Commons^™

Managing The Public Trust: How To Make Natural Resource Funds Work For Citizens, Andrew Bauer, Perrine Toledano, Malan Rietveld

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Given their collective size – approximately $3.5 trillion in assets as of end-2013 and growing – and concerns about the motivations of their government owners, much has been written on natural resource funds (NRFs), their investments and global influence. However their impacts on governance and public financial accountability at home have received far less attention.

On the one hand, these funds can be used to serve the public interest, for example by covering budget deficits when resource revenues decline, saving for future generations, or helping to mitigate Dutch Disease through fiscal sterilization. On the other hand, they can undermine public …

Market Efficiency After The Financial Crisis: It's Still A Matter Of Information Costs, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Contrary to the views of many commentators, the Efficient Capital Market Hypothesis ("ECMH"), as originally framed in financial economics, was not "disproven" by the Subprime Crisis of 2007-2008, nor has it been shown to be irrelevant to the project of regulatory reform of financial markets. To the contrary, the ECMH points to commonsense reforms in the wake of the Crisis, some of which have already been adopted. The Crisis created a lot of losers – from individual investors to pension funds and German Landesbanken – who purchased mortgage-backed securities that they did not, and perhaps could not, understand, and it …

How To Improve The Financial Architecture And Its Resilience, Dirk Helbing, Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Fabio Caccioli, J. Doyne Farmer, Steve Keen, Katharina Pistor, Dennis J. Snower, Olsen Richard, Angelo Ranaldo, Norbert Häring, Edward Fullbrook

Faculty Scholarship

This financial resilience survey was circulated on behalf of a working group of the Complexity Council of the World Economic Forum comprised of Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly of London School of Economics and Prof. Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich's Risk Center. It was sent to a few dozens of financial experts with the aim to create an inventory of ideas of how the financial system might be improved and made more resilient. Unconventional ideas were also welcome.

Do Defaults On Payday Loans Matter?, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the effect on a borrower’s financial health of failure to repay a payday loan. Recent regulatory initiatives suggest an inclination to add an “ability to pay” requirement to payday-loan underwriting that would be fundamentally inconsistent with the nature of the product. Because the premise of that regulation would be that borrowers suffer harm when they fail to repay such a loan, it is timely to examine the after-effects of such a default empirically. This essay examines that question using a dataset that combines payday borrowing histories with credit bureau information.

The essay uses a difference-in-difference approach, comparing …

Three Proposals For Regulating The Distribution Of Home Equity, Ian Ayres, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recently-released “qualified mortgage” rules effectively discourage predatory lending but miss an equally important source of systemic risk: low-equity clustering. Specific “volatility-inducing” mortgage terms, when present in a substantial cluster of mortgage contracts, exacerbate macroeconomic risk by increasing the chance that the housing and lending markets will have to absorb a wave of simultaneous defaults after a downturn in housing prices. This Article shows that these terms became prevalent in a substantial proportion of residential mortgages in the years leading up to the home mortgage crisis. In contrast, during the earlier “amortization era” (when mortgagors were …

Money Market Funds Run Risk: Will Floating Net Asset Value Fix The Problem?, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Christopher M. Gandia

Faculty Scholarship

The instability of money market mutual funds (“MMF”), a relatively new form of financial intermediary that connects short-term debt issuers with funders who want daily liquidity, became manifest in the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a major issuer of money market debt, led one large fund to “break the buck” (that is, violate the $1 net asset valuation convention (“NAV”)) and triggered a run on other funds that was staunched only by major interventions from the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve. One common reform proposal has been to substitute “floating NAV” for “fixed NAV,” on …

Assessing The Optimism Of Payday Loan Borrowers, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article compares the results from a survey administered to payday loan borrowers at the time of their loans to subsequent borrowing and repayment behavior. It thus presents the first direct evidence of the accuracy of payday loan borrowers’ understanding of how the product will be used. The data show, among other things, that about 60 percent of borrowers accurately predict how long it will take them finally to repay their payday loans. The evidence directly contradicts the oft-stated view that substantially all extended use of payday loans is the product of lender misrepresentation or borrower self-deception about how the …

A Fresh Look At State Asset Protection Trust Statutes, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the rise of state asset protection trust ('APT) statutes. It juxtaposes two apparently contrary trends: an increase in formal legal responses suggesting that the trusts created under these statutes are likely to have at best limited enforceability and an increase in the adoption and use of these statutes. After summarizing the legal background out of which these two trends arise, I analyze the characteristics of the states that have chosen to adopt them to date and conclude that the size of a state is less predictive of adoption than broader social and economic characteristics of the populace. …

Mortgage Modification And Strategic Behavior: Evidence From A Legal Settlement With Countrywide, Christopher Mayer, Edward R. Morrison, Tomasz Piskorski, Arpit Gupta

Faculty Scholarship

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by settlement of U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer modifications to seriously delinquent borrowers. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find that Countrywide's monthly delinquency rate increased more than 0.54 percentage points – ten percent relative increase – immediately after the settlement's announcement. The estimated increase in default rates is largest among borrowers least likely to default otherwise. These results suggest that strategic behavior should be an important consideration in designing mortgage modification programs.

Three Discount Windows, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

It is widely assumed that the Federal Reserve is the lender of last resort in the United States and that the Fed's discount window is the primary mechanism through which it fulfills this role. Yet, when banks faced liquidity constraints during the 2007-2009 financial cfisis (the Cisis), the discount window played a relatively small role in providing banks much needed liquidity. This is not because banks forewent government-backed liquidity; rather, they sought it elsewhere. First, they increased their reliance on collateralized loans, known as advances, from the Federal Home Loan Bank System, a little-known government-sponsored enterprise that grew in size …

Rolling Back The Repo Safe Harbors, Edward R. Morrison, Mark J. Roe, Christopher S. Sontchi

Faculty Scholarship

Recent decades have seen substantial expansion in exemptions from the Bankruptcy Code's normal operation for repurchase agreements. These repos, which are equivalent to very short-term (often one-day) secured loans, are exempt from core bankruptcy rules such as the automatic stay that enjoins debt collection, rules against prebankruptcy fraudulent transfers, and rules against eve-of-bankruptcy preferential payment to favored creditors over other creditors. While these exemptions can be justified for United States Treasury securities and similarly liquid obligations backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, they are not justified for mortgage-backed securities and other securities that could …

Extraterritorial Financial Regulation: Why E.T. Can't Come Home, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins with a deliberately off-putting title: extraterritorial financial regulation. Old-time "conflict of laws" scholars would call this an oxymoron, pointing to recent Supreme Court decisions – most notably, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. and Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. – that have applied a strong presumption against extraterritoriality to curb the reach of U.S. law. Even those international law scholars who are sympathetic to the regulation of multinational financial institutions might prefer to avoid this term and talk instead of "global financial regulation" because they conceptualize international financial regulation as implemented through networks of cooperating multinational …

The Judiciary And Fiscal Crises: An Institutional Critique, Peter Conti-Brown, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have long debated the role for courts with respect to governmental action that responds to crisis. Most of the crises analyzed, however, are exogenous to the political process; the courts’ role in response to politically endogenous crises has received less attention. We evaluate the role of the judiciary in a subset of those endogenous crises: the judicial treatment of governmental efforts to resolve the crisis facing underfunded public pensions. Assessing institutional competence schematically with reference to an institution’s democratic accountability and fact-finding ability, we argue that, where institutions function properly, judicial intervention in politically endogenous economic crises should be …

Mechanism Design In M&A Auctions, Steven J. Brams, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The recent controversy over "Don't Ask, Don't Waive" standstills in M&A practice highlights the need to apply mechanism design to change-of-control transactions. In this Article, we propose a novel two-stage auction procedure that induces honest bidding among participants while potentially yielding a higher sale price than an open ascending, a sealed-bid first price, or a Vickrey second-price auction. Our procedure balances deal certainty with value maximization through the Nobel Prize-winning principle of incentive compatibility, making participation in the M&A auction and honest disclosure of reservation prices in the parties' interests rather than relying solely on heavy-handed ex-post enforcement. Moreover, the …

Dodd-Frank Orderly Liquidation Authority: Too Big For The Constitution?, Thomas W. Merrill, Margaret L. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Title II of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 establishes a new specialized insolvency regime, known as orderly liquidation, for systemically significant nonbank financial companies. While well intended, Title II unfortunately raises a number of serious constitutional questions. To vest authority in an Article III judge to appoint a receiver for such companies, yet also avoid a financial panic, Dodd–Frank requires that the judicial proceedings be conducted in secret, with no notice to the public or other interested parties on pain of criminal penalties, and that the judge rule on the petition to appoint the …

The Empty Call For Benefit-Cost Analysis In Financial Regulation, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The call for benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in financial regulation misunderstands the origins and utility of BCA as a guide to administrative rule making. Benefit-cost analysis imagines an omniscient social planner who can calculate costs and benefits from a natural system that generates prices (costs and benefits) that do not change (or change much) no matter what the central planner does. For example, the toxicity of chemicals, the health hazards of emissions, the statistical value of life – these do not change in response to health-and-safety regulation. For the financial sector, however, the system that generates costs and benefits is constructed …

On Experimentation And Real Options In Financial Regulation, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Financial regulators have recently faced enhanced judicial scrutiny of their cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in advance of significant reforms. One facet of this scrutiny is judicial skepticism toward experimentation (and the real option to abandon) in the CBA calculus. That is, agencies have arguably been discouraged from counting as a benefit the value of information obtained through adopting new regulations on a provisional basis, with an option to revert to the status quo in the future. We study field experimentation versus more conventional forms of CBA (or analytic learning) in a regulatory-judicial hierarchical model. We demonstrate that there is no principled …