In the last dozen years, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country’s laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. Much of this research has dealt with rules...

For nearly two years, the two of us have had a running discussion of the costs and benefits of automatic stays in bankruptcy for qualified financial contracts (QFCs) such as derivatives and repurchase agreements, particularly those held by systemically important major dealer banks. Under current...

Although the cost of financial distress is a central issue in capital structure and credit risk studies, reliable estimates of its size are difficult to come by. This paper proposes a novel method of extracting the cost of default from the change in the market value of a firm's assets upon...

We shed new light on the corporate governance role of institutional investors in markets where concentrated ownership and business groups are prevalent. When companies have controlling shareholders, institutional investors, as minority shareholders, can play only a limited role in corporate...

This Paper develops a model of the competition among states in providing corporate law rules. The analysis provides a full characterization of the equilibrium in this market. Competition among states is shown to produce optimal rules with respect to issues that do not have a substantial effect...

This book is a comparative study of international practices in bankruptcy law, providing perspectives from a variety of specialisms including practitioners, lawyers, bankers, accountants and judges from the United Arab Emirates, the UK and Singapore