Securities Law Commons^™

Law And The Market: The Impact Of Enforcement, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Are the U.S. capital markets losing their competitiveness? A fascinating question, but what does it mean and how can it be intelligently assessed? This Article will explore the newly popular thesis that draconian enforcement and overregulation are injuring the United States and will offer a sharply contrasting interpretation: higher enforcement intensity gives the U.S. economy a lower cost of capital and higher securities valuations. This higher intensity attracts some foreign listings, but deters others.

This Article will proceed by first mapping the marked variation in the intensity of enforcement efforts by securities regulators in selected nations and then relating these …