Law and Economics Commons^™

Democracy, Law And Global Finance: A Legal And Institutional Perspective, Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

Finance has become more a problem than a solution to what the world most wants: socially inclusive growth. It has become a source of crises that threaten the development of the real economy. It has escaped accountability to democratic institutions and often helped, instead, to influence and corrupt them. Its potential to contribute to broad-based opportunity-expanding growth has been largely and massively squandered.

In this piece I seek to understand not only how this failure manifests itself in some of the major countries and regions of the world, but also, how it can be corrected.

The intellectual and policy response …

Democracy, Law And Global Finance: An Example Of A Research Agenda For A New Practice Of Law And Economics, Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

No abstract provided.

Law And Finance In The Context Of Crisis: The Imperative Of Structural Vision, Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

This piece explores the worldwide response to the recent financial and economic crisis through a comparative analysis of financial crisis, regulation and reform in the US and in several emerging market countries.

Two main ideas inform my argument.

The first idea is the inadequacy of ways of dealing with the crisis that fail to enlist finance more effectively in the service of the real economy, rather than allowing it to serve itself, and that misunderstand globalization as an unyielding constraint on institutional experimentation at home. A wide range of historical and contemporary examples helps make the point.

The second idea …

American Finance And American Democracy: Towards An Institutionalist "Law And Economics", Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

This article reconsiders the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009 and the present debate about the regulation of finance in the light of a vision of how finance can better serve the American economy and American Democracy. The central claim is that regulation as conventionally understood cannot adequately redress the problems, and seize the opportunities, revealed by the crisis. We should approach financial regulation as the first step in a series of institutional innovations designed to put finance more effectively at the service of the real economy (financial deepening) while broadening economic opportunity in the country (financial democratization). I develop …

Rethinking Finance Through Law: A Theoretical Perspective, Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

Finance is traditionally studied by lawyers as well as by economists on the basis of the premise that a market economy has, at its core, a single natural and necessary institutional form, expressed, for example, in the basic rules and doctrines of contract and property. The literature about "varieties of capitalism" has proved insufficient to challenge this assumption. A corollary of this premise is the view that, barring particular market defects, a market economy can be counted on to channel the savings of society to its most efficient possible uses. The first task of regulation is supposedly to redress such …

O Passado E O Futuro Financeiro Dos Estados Unidos Da America: O Experimentalismo Americano Sem O Excepcionalismo Americano, Tamara Lothian

Tamara Lothian

Este trabalho apresenta uma distincao entre a reforma regulatoria financeira e a reconstrucao institucional, e argumenta que os esforcos dos EUA e do outros paises para reformar a regulacao de financas podem e devem servir como um primeiro passo para a reconstrucao institucional. A crise financeira revelou uma serie de problemas que nao podem ser resolvidos atraves da simples regulacao. Tais problemas exigem inovacoes destinadas a reorganizar a relacao das financas com a economia real. Para isso, precisamos de uma pratica de analise juridica e economica atenta as realidades e possibilidades institucionais. Este trabalho exemplifica essa pratica no cenario da …