Law and Economics Commons^™

Deconstructing Corporate Governance: Director Primacy Without Principle?, René Reich-Graefe

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

For almost eighty years now, corporate law scholarship has centered around two elementary analytical findings made in what has once been described as the “last major work of original scholarship”within the field.

Incentivizing Economic Development: An Empirical Examination Of The Use Of Grants And Loans, Robert T. Greenbaum, Daniele Bondonio

South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business

No abstract provided.

Lessons For Competition Law From The Economic Crisis: The Prospect For Antitrust Responses To The “Too-Big-To-Fail” Phenomenon, Jesse W. W. Markham, Jr.

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This article examines whether, and the extent to which, antitrust law could contribute to a broader regulatory effort to control the too-big-to-fail problem. The article begins by exploring the nature of the problem. Against this backdrop, it considers antitrust policy and rules to evaluate whether antitrust might play a meaningful role. The article concludes that antitrust law, if vigorously enforced with an emphasis on avoiding too-big-to-fail problems, can be a useful public policy tool to address the problem. However, it can come nowhere near solving it or preventing recurrences of recent systemic failures.

Controlling Health Care Costs Through Public, Transparent Processes: The Conflict Between The Morally Right And The Socially Feasible, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

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 …

Law As Asymmetric Information: Theory, Application, And Results In The Context Of Foreign Direct Investment In Real Estate, Patrick J. Glen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In his seminal 1970 article on lemon markets, George Akerlof posited the possibility of market failure in the presence of asymmetric information regarding a good’s value. In the intervening four decades, the importance of accurate valuation information has grown as transnational trade has boomed. The aim of the instant article is to assess the potential impact on transnational trade of asymmetric information regarding the legal attributes of a given good. Inaccurate or asymmetric information regarding relevant legal attributes may give rise to the same problem of market failure that Akerlof initially posited. If buyers are unsure of the ownership of …

The Behavioral Economics Of Mergers And Acquisitions, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The world of mergers and acquisitions seems like a setting in which rationality necessarily dominates. There are high stakes, focused and sustained attention, and expert advisers who are repeat players. In the economics and management literature, however, there has been a great deal of research on what might be called “behavioral M&A”—using insights from psychology to explain observed patterns of behavior in the acquisitions marketplace. To date, the law has largely been uninterested in the psychological dynamics of corporate acquisitions. This essay looks at recent research on such issues as the role of overconfidence, hubris, anchoring, etc. in explaining buy-side …

Lyondell: A Note Of Approbation, William W. Bratton

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mortgage Foreclosures, Mortgage Morality, And Main Street: What’S Really Happening?, Jennifer M. Smith

Journal Publications

The American economy is in the tank. Millions of citizens are without jobs, overwhelmed with credit card debt, and losing their homes. The brighter side is that as a result, America has finally embraced financial reform, and the unstable economy is stabilizing marriages. Nevertheless, the United States remains in the midst of a housing crisis, and the ending remains uncertain.

There has been a media blitz about the housing crisis and Wall Street - corporate interests, but much less about the actual impact of the housing crisis on Main Street - America's working class people and small business owners. This …

Credit Derivatives, Leverage, And Financial Regulation's Missing Macroeconomic Dimension, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

Of all OTC derivatives, credit derivatives pose particular concerns because of their ability to generate leverage that can increase liquidity - or the effective money supply - throughout the financial system. Credit derivatives and the leverage they create thus do much more than increase the fragility of financial institutions and increase counterparty risk. By increasing leverage and liquidity, credit derivatives can fuel rises in asset prices and even asset price bubbles. Rising asset prices can then mask mistakes in the pricing of credit derivatives and in assessments of overall leverage in the financial system. Furthermore, the use of credit derivatives …

Under Attack: Terrorism Risk Insurance Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Scholarly debates over the September 11th attacks focus predominantly on high-profile issues, such as torture, preventive detention, interrogation, privacy, and surveillance. These debates have overshadowed the equally important and far-reaching issue of terrorism risk insurance, which not only involves billions of dollars, but provides powerful incentives to keep us safe. Developing a sound understanding of the market for terrorism risk insurance is essential to guiding the difficult determination of the appropriate balance between private and public responsibility for preventing and (when necessary) compensating for terrorism.

The attacks of September 11th represented one of the costliest insurance events in American history. …

Unraveling Privacy: The Personal Prospectus And The Threat Of A Full-Disclosure Future, Scott R. Peppet

Publications

Information technologies are reducing the costs of credible signaling, just as they have reduced the costs of data mining and economic sorting. The burgeoning informational privacy field has ignored this evolution, leaving it unprepared to deal with the consequences of these new signaling mechanisms. In an economy with robust signaling, those with valuable credentials, clean medical records, and impressive credit scores will want to disclose those traits to receive preferential economic treatment. Others may then find that they must also disclose private information to avoid the negative inferences attached to staying silent. This unraveling effect creates new types of privacy …

A Conversation With President Obama: A Dialogue About Poverty, Race, And Class In Black America, Joseph Karl Grant

Journal Publications

The date is November 13, 2012.1 Just mere days ago, I received the invitation of a lifetime. Last night, I arrived in Washington, D.C. I am staying in the Hay-Adams Hotel on the third floor. I still cannot believe the extent of my life's journey. I have just been summoned to the White House by second term President-elect Barack Obama, who defeated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President on November 6, 2012. The 2012 Presidential Election was a hard-fought battle between Barack Obama on the Democratic side, and Mitt Romney on Republican side. The election was a like the …

Neo-Classical Economic Theories, Methodology, And Praxis Optimize Criminogenic Environments And Produce Recurrent, Intensifying Crises, William K. Black

Faculty Works

Control frauds” are seemingly legitimate entities controlled by persons that use them as a fraud “weapon.” A single control fraud can cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. This article focuses on the role of neo-classical economic theory, methodology, and praxis is optimizing criminogenic environments that hyper-inflate financial bubbles and produce recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Financial control frauds’ “weapon of choice” is accounting. Neoclassical theory, which dominates law & economics, is criminogenic because it assumes that control fraud cannot exist while recommending legal policies that optimize an industry for control fraud. Its hostility to regulation, endorsement …

Those Who Ignore The Successes Of The Past Suffer Recurrent, Intensifying Crises, William K. Black

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Bricks, Mortar, And Google: Defining The Relevant Antitrust Market For Internet-Based Companies, Jared Kagan

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Meaningful Good Faith: Managerial Motives And The Duty To Obey The Law, Peter C. Kostant

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Director Liability For Corporate Crimes: Lawyers As Safe Haven?, John A. Humbach

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Duty Of Obedience: The Forgotten Duty, Alan R. Palmiter

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Good Faith In Delaware: How Open-Ended Standards Help Delaware Preserve Its Edge, Renee M. Jones

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.