Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …