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Full-Text Articles in Law
Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, Frederick Tung, M Todd Henderson
Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, Frederick Tung, M Todd Henderson
Faculty Scholarship
In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate. We call this “reverse regulatory arbitrage,” and we think it can help improve regulatory outcomes. Building on our prior work that proposes to pay bank examiners for performance — by giving them financial incentives to avoid bank failures — we argue that bank supervisory assignments should be set through …
Bank Ceos, Inside Debt Compensation, And The Global Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung, Xue Wang
Bank Ceos, Inside Debt Compensation, And The Global Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung, Xue Wang
Faculty Scholarship
Bank executives’ compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers’ equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any correlation between bank CEO equity incentives and bank performance in the Financial Crisis. We offer an alternative analysis, hypothesizing that bank CEOs’ inside debt incentives correlate with reduced bank risk taking and improved bank performance in the Crisis. A nascent literature shows that inside debt may dampen CEOs’ risk taking incentives. Unlike the industrial firms that …
Behaviorally Informed Regulation, Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir
Behaviorally Informed Regulation, Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir
Book Chapters
Policy makers typically approach human behavior from the perspective of the rational agent model, which relics on normativc, a priori analyses. The model assumes people make insightful, well-planned, highly controlled, and calculated decisions guided by considerations of personal utility. This perspective is promoted in the social sciences and in professional schools and has come to dominate much of the formulation and conduct of policy. An alternative view, developed mostly through empirical behavioral research, and the one we will articulate here, provides a substantially difierent perspective on individual behavior and its policy and regulatory implications. According to the empirical perspective, behavior …
Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr
Too Libor, Too Late: Time To Move To A Market Rate, Michael S. Barr
Articles
Barclays has been fined, the British have issued their report, and now the market is anxious for everything to go on as usual with the London Interbank Offer Rate (“LIBOR”). I think that would be a serious mistake. The U.S. and British investigations into rate-fixing by Barclays revealed a widespread culture of pervasive, deceitful conduct in the setting of the most important private sector benchmark for over $300 trillion in derivative contracts and $10 trillion in adjustable-rate loans. It is highly unlikely that Barclays was the only major bank engaging in this conduct, and public investigations and private lawsuits against …