Law Commons^™

Interest Rates, Venture Capital, And Financial Stability, Hilary J. Allen

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Following several prominent bank failures and as central banks continue to tighten interest rates to fight inflation, there is increasing interest in the relationship between monetary policy and financial stability. This Article illuminates one path through which the prolonged period of low interest rates from 2009-2021 has impacted financial stability: it traces how yield-seeking behavior in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and Covid pandemic led to a bubble in the venture capital industry, which in turn spawned a crypto bubble as well as a run on the VC-favored Silicon Valley Bank. This Article uses this narrative to illustrate …

Who Benefits From Corporate Tax Cuts?: Evidence From Banks And Credit Unions Around The Tcja, Edward Fox, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

The TCJA of 2017 made large changes to the taxation of corporate and pass-through businesses in the U.S. Understanding the effects of these changes is complicated by the difficulty of finding control firms whose taxation was not altered by the Act. We study the effect of the TCJA on small and medium size banks using credit unions—which compete with these banks for deposits and in making loans—as a novel control group. Credit unions were not taxed both before and after the Act. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find that an important fraction of the incidence of the tax cut goes …

Remutualization, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

Policymakers need to rediscover the organizational form of business entity as a tool of financial regulation. Recent and classic scholarship has produced evidence that financial institutions organized as alternative entity forms – including investment bank partnerships and banks and insurance companies organized as mutual or cooperatives – tend to take less risk, exploit customers/consumer less, or commit less misconduct compared to counterparts organized as investor-owned corporations. This article builds off the work of Hill and Painter on investment banks organized as partnerships, Hansmann on the history and economics of banks and insurance companies organized as mutuals and cooperatives, and other …

Making Consumer Finance Work, Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets.

Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare-enhancing, while the financial sector declared that consumers would be harmed by interventions. With a decade of data now available, this Article presents the first empirical examination of the successes and failures of the consumer finance reform agenda. Specifically, I marshal data from every zip code and bank in the United States to test the efficacy of three of the most significant post-crisis …

The New Synthesis Of Bank Regulation And Bankruptcy In The Dodd-Frank Era, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, U.S. bank regulation and bankruptcy have become far more closely intertwined. In this Article, I ask whether the new synthesis of bank regulation and bankruptcy is coherent, and whether it is likely to prove effective.

I begin by exploring some of the basic differences between bank resolution, which is a highly administrative process in the U.S., and bankruptcy, which relies more on courts and the parties themselves. I then focus on a series of remarkable new innovations designed to facilitate the rapid recapitalization of systemically important financial institutions: convertible contingent capital …

The Effect Of The Jobs Act On Underwriting Spreads, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

U.S. underwriting fees, or spreads, have somewhat inexplicably clustered around 7% for years, a phenomenon that some have suggested evidences implicit collusion. The goal of Title I the JOBS Act of 2012 was to make going public easier for smaller firms; certain provisions specifically should make the underwriters’ task less risky, and thus less expensive. Presuming these provisions are effective, then one would predict that underwriting spreads would decrease as the costs to the underwriter for a public offering declined. Admittedly the prior presumption is a big one: it may be that the JOBS Act reforms were largely ineffective, and …

Testimony Before The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Miami, Florida September 21, 2010, William K. Black

Faculty Works

"Control frauds" are seemingly legitimate entities controlled by persons that use them as a fraud "weapon." (The person that controls the firm is typically the CEO, so that term is used in this testimony.) A single control fraud can cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. Neo-classical economic theory, methodology, and praxis combine to optimize criminogenic environments that hyper-inflate financial bubbles and produce recurrent, intensifying financial crises. A criminogenic environment is one that creates such perverse incentives that it leads to widespread crime. Financial control frauds’ "weapon of choice" is accounting. Neoclassical theory, which dominates law …

How Law Affects Lending, Rainer F.H. Haselmann, Katharina Pistor, Vikrant Vig

Faculty Scholarship

The paper explores how legal change affects lending behavior of banks in twelve transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to previous studies, we use bank level rather than aggregate data, which allows us to control for country level heterogeneity and analyze the effect of legal change on different types of lenders. Using a differences-in-differences methodology to analyze the within country variation of changes in creditor rights protection, we find that the credit supplied by banks increases subsequent to legal change. Further, we show that collateral law matters more for credit market development than bankruptcy law. We also …

The Value Of Public-Notice Filing Under Uniform Commercial Code Article 9: A Comparison With The German Legal System Of Securities In Personal Property, Jens Hausmann

LLM Theses and Essays

In contrast to the public-notice filing system under U.C.C. Article 9, the modern German law of securities in personal property lacks publicity of security interests. The German courts have developed a mesh of priority rules exhaustively described in this analysis. Despite the costs and risks arising under the formal filing system, the U.C.C. accomplishes a preferable balance of interests involved in secured transactions. It assures certainty to creditors about the priority of security interests in particular assets, whereas the German law comprehensively recognizes the debtor’s interest in the secrecy of the transaction and the need for external capital. Regarding the …