Finance Commons^™

Institutionalization, Investment Adviser Regulation, And The Hedge Fund Problem, Anita Krug

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that more effective regulation of investment advisers could be achieved by recognizing that the growth of hedge funds, private equity funds, and other private funds in recent decades is a manifestation of institutionalization in the investment advisory context. That is, investment advisers today commonly advise these “institutions,” which have supplanted other, smaller investors as advisory clients. However, the federal securities statute governing investment advisers, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, does not address the role of private funds as institutions that now intermediate those smaller investors’ relationships to investment advisers. Consistent with that failure, investment adviser regulation …

Resolving Large, Complex Financial Firms, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Mark Greenlee, James Thomson

James B Thomson

How to best manage the failure of systemically important fi nancial fi rms was the theme of a recent conference at which the latest research on the issue was presented. Here we summarize that research, the discussions that it sparked, and the areas where considerable work remains.

How Well Does Bankruptcy Work When Large Financial Firms Fail? Some Lessons From Lehman Brothers, Thomas Fitzpatrick, James Thomson

James B Thomson

There is disagreement about whether large and complex financial institutions should be allowed to use U.S. bankruptcy law to reorganize when they get into financial difficulty. We look at the Lehman example for lessons about whether bankruptcy law might be a better alternative to bailouts or to resolution under the Dodd-Frank Act’s orderly liquidation authority. We find that there is no clear evidence that bankruptcy law is insufficient to handle the resolution of large complex financial firms.

The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamental changes in economic thought revolutionized the theory of corporate finance, leading to changes in its legal regulation. The changes were massive, and this branch of financial analysis and law became virtually unrecognizable to those who had practiced it earlier. The source of this revision was the marginalist, or neoclassical, revolution in economic thought. The classical theory had seen corporate finance as an historical, relatively self-executing inquiry based on the classical theory of value and administered by common law courts. By contrast, neoclassical value theory was forward looking and as a result …

A Preface To Neoclassical Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Most legal historians speak of the period following classical legal thought as “progressive legal thought.” That term creates an unwarranted bias in characterization, however, creating the impression that conservatives clung to an obsolete “classical” ideology, when in fact they were in many ways just as revisionist as the progressives legal thinkers whom they critiqued. The Progressives and New Deal thinkers whom we identify with progressive legal thought were nearly all neoclassical, or marginalist, in their economics, but it is hardly true that all marginalists were progressives. For example, the lawyers and policy makers in the corporate finance battles of the …

U.S. Appellate Court Ruling Deals Fatal Blow To Argentina Brady Bond Debt Swap, Mark J. Calaguas

Mark J Calaguas

No abstract provided.

Recent Developments In European Bank Competition, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the degree of bank competition in the euro area, the U.S. and U.K. before and after the recent financial crisis, and revisits the issue whether the introduction of EMU and the euro have had any impact on bank competition. The results suggest that the level of bank competition converged across euro area countries in the wake of the EMU. The recent global financial crisis led to a fall in competition in several countries and especially where large credit and housing booms had preceded the crisis...

Reflexivity In Financial Markets: A Neuroeconomic Examination Of Uncertainty And Cognition In Financial Markets, Steven Pikelny

Senior Projects Spring 2011

Financial markets exist to disperse the risks of an unknown future in an economy. But for this process to work in an optimal fashion, investors – and subsequently markets – must have a way to interpret uncertainty. The investor rationality and market efficiency literature utilizes a methodology inadequate to address this fact, so I supplement it with the perspectives of epistemology, economic sociology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. This approach suggests that what is commonly viewed as market “inefficiency” is not necessarily caused by investor irrationality, but rather by the inherent nature of the epistemological problem faced by …

The Political Economy Of Fraud On The Market, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Financial Stability Is A Volume Business: A Comment On The Legal Infrastructure Of Ex Post Consumer Debtor Protections, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor Melissa B. Jacoby's essay pays homage to Stewart Macaulay's classic study of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, a U.S. federal consumer protection law that, according to Macaulay, was virtually unknown to the lawyers whose clients needed it the most. The moral of Macaulay's study is that even good consumer protection laws on the books often fail to deliver in action for complex cultural, institutional, and economic reasons. Yet reducing Professor Jacoby's essay to this very important moral undersells its contribution. A fragmented infrastructure for legal service delivery of the sort she describes does not merely fail consumers more often than …

International Comparisons Of Bank Regulation, Liberalization, And Banking Crises, Puspa Amri, Apanard P. Angkinand, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Purpose: The recurrence of banking crises throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and in the more recent 2008-09 global financial crisis, has led to an expanding empirical literature on crisis explanation and prediction. This paper provides an analytical review of proxies for and important determinants of banking crises − credit growth, financial liberalization, bank regulation and supervision.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The study surveys the banking crisis literature by comparing proxies for and measures of banking crises and policy-related variables in the literature. Advantages and disadvantages of different proxies are discussed.

Findings: Disagreements about determinants of banking crises are in part …