Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dual-Class Shares In Singapore – Where Ideology Meets Pragmatism, Pey Woan Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article seeks to understand the rationale for and potential implications of the introduction of dual class shares (DCS) in Singapore. It does so by first considering the theoretical as well as evidential arguments for and against the use of DCS, followed by a survey on the reception (or otherwise) of such structures in four common law jurisdictions with vibrant capital markets, viz., Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and Hong Kong. It observes that the chief argument cited by business founders to justify the use of DCS structures is the desire to enhance a firm’s long-term profitability by shielding …

Law Library Blog (November 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Enforcing Town Councils’ Duties Of Financial Prudence: Problems Addressed By The Town Councils (Amendment) Act 2017, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article discusses the means by which a TownCouncil’s statutory duties, particularly its duties of financial prudence, maybe enforced. It studies the law as it was prior to 2017 and reveals variousconceptual and practical problems, the result of which was that it was possiblefor a Town Council to fail to perform its statutory duties and face onlyminimal consequences. This article willprovide a background to some of the new statutory procedures introduced in the2017 amendments to the Town Councils Act, which solve the problems from whichthe previous law suffered. It is hoped that this will shed light on the historyof the …

The Salience Theory Of Consumer Financial Regulation, Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

Prior to the financial crisis, banks’ fee income was their fastest-growing source of revenue. This revenue was often generated through nefarious bank practices (e.g., ordering overdraft transactions for maximal fees). The crisis focused popular attention on the extent to which current regulatory tools failed consumers in these markets, and policymakers responded: A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was tasked with monitoring consumer finance products, and some of the earliest post-crisis financial reforms sought to lower consumer costs. This Article is the first to empirically evaluate the success of the consumer finance reform agenda by considering three recent price regulations: a …

Private Wealth And Public Goods: A Case For A National Investment Authority, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Much American electoral and policy debate now centers on how best to reignite the nation’s economic dynamism and rebuild its competitive strength. Any such undertaking presents an extraordinary challenge, demanding a correspondingly extraordinary institutional response. This Article proposes precisely such a response. It designs and advocates a new public instrumentality--a National Investment Authority (“NIA”)--charged with the critical task of devising and implementing a comprehensive long-term development strategy for the United States.

Patterned in part after the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in part after modern sovereign wealth funds, and in part after private equity and venture capital firms, the NIA …

The New Additional Conveyance Duties Regime In The Stamp Duties Act, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The new additional conveyance duties regime has gone beyond attempting to achieve tax neutrality between direct transfers of residential property and indirect transfers through the use of property-holding entities. It taxes an entirely new tax base and raises issues such as: the extremely broad concept of an “associate” relationship; definition of “unit in a property trust”; anti-avoidance provisions; liability for providing false information; tax neutrality; and the considerable flexibility that the section 23 Order provides the Government. This article analyses the regime in detail and considers the implications of various changes to the prescribed values in the section 23 Order.

Horizontal Shareholding And Antitrust Policy, Fiona M. Scott Morton, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

“Horizontal shareholding” occurs when one or more equity funds own shares of competitors operating in a concentrated product market. For example, the four largest mutual fund companies might be large shareholders of all the major United States air carriers. A growing body of empirical literature concludes that under these conditions market output in the product market is lower and prices higher than they would otherwise be.

Here we consider how the antitrust laws might be applied to this practice, identifying the issues that courts are likely to encounter and attempting to anticipate litigation problems. We assume that neither the mutual …

Insolvency Law As Credit Enhancement And Enforcement Mechanism: A Closer Look At Global Modernization Of Secured Transactions Law, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay revisits earlier work on the relationship between insolvency law and secured credit, the role of secured transactions law reforms, and the benefits of secured credit. These complex relationships require a holistic approach toward reforms of secured transactions law and insolvency law. Merely enacting sensible secured transactions laws and insolvency laws may be insufficient to produce the intended benefits from either set of laws.

The essay is informed by an ongoing qualitative empirical study of business credit in Japan—the Japanese Business Credit Project. The JBCP involves interviews of representatives of Japanese financial institutions and governmental bodies and legal practitioners …

The Weakening Of Fiduciary Law, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

In the 1970s and 80s, as major financial institutions grew and diversified their operations, courts and scholars recognized that fiduciary law posed profound challenges for the organizational practices of these firms. The challenges were considered existential by some: firms, ultimately, would need to slim down their operations, and perhaps even need to disaggregate some units, to avoid fiduciary liability. However, since these challenges were recognized, financial conglomerates have grown massively and focused more on taking direct stakes as principals, a practice that accentuates the risk of conflicts of interest.

How were financial conglomerates able to continue growing and diversifying despite …

The Hausmann-Gorky Effect, Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza

Faculty Scholarship

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist, Ricardo Hausmann, in May 2017, may have shown an alternative path to the goal of increasing the cost of borrowing for despotic governments. Hausmann, in his Op Ed, had sought to produce a pricing penalty on the entire Venezuelan debt stock by trying to shame JPMorgan into removing Venezuelan bonds from its emerging …