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Full-Text Articles in Law
Rollover Risk: Ideating A U.S. Debt Default, Steven L. Schwarcz
Rollover Risk: Ideating A U.S. Debt Default, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This article examines how a U.S. debt default might occur, how it could be avoided, its potential consequences if not avoided, and how those consequences could be mitigated. To that end, the article differentiates defaults caused by insolvency from defaults caused by illiquidity. The latter, which are potentiated by rollover risk (the risk that the government will be temporarily unable to borrow sufficient funds to repay its maturing debt), are not only plausible but have occurred in the past. Moreover, the ongoing controversy over the federal debt ceiling and the rise of the shadow-banking system make these types of defaults …
The Bankruptcy-Law Safe Harbor For Derivatives: A Path-Dependence Analysis, Steven L. Schwarcz, Ori Sharon
The Bankruptcy-Law Safe Harbor For Derivatives: A Path-Dependence Analysis, Steven L. Schwarcz, Ori Sharon
Faculty Scholarship
U.S. bankruptcy law grants special rights and immunities to creditors in derivatives transactions, including virtually unlimited enforcement rights. This article argues that these rights and immunities result from a form of path dependence, a sequence of industry-lobbied legislative steps, each incremental and in turn serving as apparent justification for the next step, without a rigorous and systematic vetting of the consequences. Because the resulting “safe harbor” has not been fully vetted, its significance and utility should not be taken for granted; and thus regulators, legislators, and other policymakers—whether in the United States or abroad—should not automatically assume, based on its …
The Governance Structure Of Shadow Banking: Rethinking Assumptions About Limited Liability, Steven L. Schwarcz
The Governance Structure Of Shadow Banking: Rethinking Assumptions About Limited Liability, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
In an earlier article, I argued that shadow banking — the provision of financial services and products outside of the traditional banking system, and thus without the need for bank intermediation between capital markets and the users of funds — is so radically transforming finance that regulatory scholars need to rethink their basic assumptions. This article attempts to rethink the corporate governance assumption that owners of firms should always have their liability limited to the capital they have invested. In the relatively small and decentralized firms that dominate shadow banking, equity investors tend to be active managers. Limited liability gives …
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Regulating Systemic Risk In Insurance, Daniel Schwarcz, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
As exemplified by the dramatic failure of AIG, insurance companies and their affiliates played a central role in the 2008 global financial crisis. It is therefore not surprising that the Dodd-Frank Act—the United States’ primary legislative re-sponse to the crisis—contained an entire title dedicated to insurance regulation, which has traditionally been the responsibility of individual states. The most important insurance-focused reforms in Dodd-Frank empower the Federal Reserve Bank to impose an additional layer of regulatory scrutiny on top of state insurance regulation for a small number of “systemically important” nonbank financial companies, such as AIG. This Article argues, however, that …
The Social Value Of Mortality Risk Reduction: Vsl Vs. The Social Welfare Function Approach, Matthew D. Adler, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich
The Social Value Of Mortality Risk Reduction: Vsl Vs. The Social Welfare Function Approach, Matthew D. Adler, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich
Faculty Scholarship
We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost–benefit analysis—i.e., the “value per statistical life” (VSL) approach—and various social welfare functions (SWFs). The SWFs are either utilitarian or prioritarian, applied to policy choice under risk in either an “ex post” or “ex ante” manner. We examine the conditions on individual utility and on the SWF under which these frameworks display sensitivity to wealth and to baseline risk. Moreover, we discuss whether these frameworks satisfy related properties that have received some attention in the literature, namely equal value of …