Law Commons^™

The Antitrust Case For Consumer Primacy In Corporate Governance, Ramsi A. Woodcock

UC Irvine Law Review

Consumers have been left out of the great debate over the mission of the firm, in which advocates of shareholder value maximization face off against advocates of corporate social responsibility, who would allow management leeway to allocate profits to workers and other non-shareholder insiders of the firm. The consumer welfare standard adopted by antitrust law in the 1970s requires that firms allocate their profits neither to shareholders nor to workers or other firm insiders. Instead, the standard requires that firms strive to have no profits at all, by charging the lowest possible prices for their products. Such a profit-minimization requirement, …

Designing Regulation For Mobile Financial Markets, Ilya Beylin

UC Irvine Law Review

Prior scholarship advocates for international harmonization of financial regulation as a solution to the problem of cross-border regulatory arbitrage. The scholarship is theoretical and rests on the contention that financial institutions can simply depart from an unfavorable regulatory regime. This Paper contributes an empirical foundation to the concern that financial institutions relocate following regulation, while also deeply qualifying claims that effective regulation requires international harmonization.

Using experience from swap markets following the Dodd-Frank Act, this Article provides the first empirical evidence that financial institutions migrate in response to derivatives regulation. This Article shows that U.S. banks substantially shifted inter-bank swap …