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Full-Text Articles in Securities Law
Gatekeeper Failure And Reform: The Challenge Of Fashioning Relevant Reforms, John C. Coffee Jr.
Gatekeeper Failure And Reform: The Challenge Of Fashioning Relevant Reforms, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
Securities markets have long employed "gatekeepers" – independent professionals who pledge their reputational capital – to protect the interests of dispersed investors who cannot easily take collective action. The clearest examples of such reputational intermediaries are auditors and securities analysts, who verify or assess corporate disclosures in order to advise investors in different ways. But during the late 1990s, these protections seemingly failed, and a unique concentration of financial scandals followed, all involving the common denominator .of accounting irregularities. What caused this sudden outburst of scandals, involving an apparent epidemic of accounting and related financial irregularities, that broke over the …
What Caused Enron? A Capsule Social And Economic History Of The 1990s, John C. Coffee Jr.
What Caused Enron? A Capsule Social And Economic History Of The 1990s, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
The sudden explosion of corporate accounting scandals and related financial irregularities that burst over the financial markets between late 2001 and the first half of 2002 – Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia and others – raises an obvious question: Why now? What explains the concentration of financial scandals at this moment in time? Much commentary has rounded up the usual suspects and placed the blame on a decline in business morality, an increase in "infectious greed," or other similarly subjective trends that cannot be reliably measured. Although none of these possibilities can be dismissed out of hand, approaches that simply reason …