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Full-Text Articles in Law
Securitization Ten Years After The Financial Crisis: An Overview, Steven L. Schwarcz
Securitization Ten Years After The Financial Crisis: An Overview, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This symposium issue examines securitization a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Prior to the crisis, securitization was one of America’s dominant means of financing. Many observers, however, blamed securitization for causing the crisis, sparking regulation that arguably has been overly restrictive and, in some cases, even punitive. Where are we now?
Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Complacency: Human Limitations And Legal Efficacy, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines how insights into limited human rationality can improve financial regulation. The Article identifies four categories of limitations—herd behavior, cognitive biases, overreliance on heuristics, and a proclivity to panic—that undermine the perfect-market regulatory assumptions that parties have full information and will act in their rational self-interest. The Article then analyzes how insights into these limitations can be used to correct resulting market failures. Requiring more robust disclosure and due diligence, for example, can help to reduce reliance on misleading information cascades that motivate herd behavior. Debiasing through law, such as requiring more specific, poignant, and concrete disclosure of …
Too Big To Fool: Moral Hazard, Bailouts, And Corporate Responsibility, Steven L. Schwarcz
Too Big To Fool: Moral Hazard, Bailouts, And Corporate Responsibility, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Domestic and international regulatory efforts to prevent another financial crisis have been converging on the idea of trying to end the problem of “too big to fail”—that systemically important financial firms take excessive risks because they profit from success and are (or at least, expect to be) bailed out by government money to avoid failure. The legal solutions being advanced to control this morally hazardous behavior tend, however, to be inefficient, ineffective, or even dangerous—such as breaking up firms and limiting their size, which can reduce economies of scale and scope; or restricting central bank authority to bail out failing …
Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz
Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Most of the regulatory measures to control excessive risk taking by systemically important firms are designed to reduce moral hazard and to align the interests of managers and investors. These measures may be flawed because they are based on questionable assumptions. Excessive corporate risk taking is, at its core, a corporate governance problem. Shareholder primacy requires managers to view the consequences of their firm’s risk taking only from the standpoint of the firm and its shareholders, ignoring harm to the public. In governing, managers of systemically important firms should also consider public harm. This proposal engages the long-standing debate whether …
Understanding The Global In Global Finance And Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter
Understanding The Global In Global Finance And Regulation, Lawrence G. Baxter
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Shadow Banking And Regulation In China And Other Developing Countries, Steven L. Schwarcz
Shadow Banking And Regulation In China And Other Developing Countries, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
The rapid but largely unregulated growth in shadow banking in developing countries such as China can jeopardize financial stability. This article discusses that growth and argues that a regulatory balance is needed to help protect financial stability while preserving shadow banking as an important channel of alternative funding. The article also analyzes how that regulation could be designed.
Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Keynote Address, Regulating Corporate Governance In The Public Interest: The Case Of Systemic Risk, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
There’s long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty—that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes, because imposing specific regulatory requirements and making certain actions illegal or tortious can mitigate the harm without unduly impairing corporate wealth production. Whether that is true in other contexts, this paper—delivered as the keynote address at the June 2016 National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School—questions if it’s true …
Misalignment: Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Misalignment: Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This article argues for a “public governance duty” to help manage excessive risk-taking by systemically important firms. Although governments worldwide, including the United States, have issued an array of regulations to attempt to curb that risk-taking by aligning managerial and investor interests, those regulations implicitly assume that investors would oppose excessively risky business ventures. That leaves a critical misalignment: because much of the harm from a systemically important firm’s failure would be externalized onto the public, including ordinary citizens impacted by an economic collapse, such a firm can engage in risk-taking ventures with positive expected value to its investors but …
Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Corporate Risk-Taking And Public Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
As exemplified by the dramatic failure of AIG, insurance companies and their affiliates played a central role in the 2008 global financial crisis. It is therefore not surprising that the Dodd-Frank Act—the United States’ primary legislative re-sponse to the crisis—contained an entire title dedicated to insurance regulation, which has traditionally been the responsibility of individual states. The most important insurance-focused reforms in Dodd-Frank empower the Federal Reserve Bank to impose an additional layer of regulatory scrutiny on top of state insurance regulation for a small number of “systemically important” nonbank financial companies, such as AIG. This Article argues, however, that …