There are few things more constant in life than the rise and fall of financial markets. When markets crash, however, we are forced to restore them while learning from our mistakes. In the wake of the recent subprime mortgage crisis, Congress has drastically but deservedly overhauled the...

Several commentators have argued that financial “reform” legislation enacted after a market crash is invariably flawed, results in “quack corporate governance” and “bubble laws,” and should be discouraged. This criticism has been specifically directed at both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act...

We survey and interview Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) of French firms in 2009 about the impact of the global financial crisis and their firms' financial flexibility levels before and during the crisis. Over two-thirds of CFOs report a strong impact of the crisis and cite liquidity problems,...

This paper is the outcome of a related broader project, exploring the explanatory power of the Legal Theory of Finance, which proposes a new institution-based analytical framework for the analysis of phenomena of financial markets. One of its most important theoretical assumptions, the legal...

This paper takes a crises management perspective on the economy of the United States in order to investigate its regulatory roles, objectives, and efficacy in dealing with its long-standing recession. It reveals that widespread corporate fraud, greed, insider trading, and so on has been due to...

Foundational financial legislation is typically adopted in the midst or aftermath of financial crises, when an informed understanding of the causes of the crisis is not yet available. Moreover, financial institutions operate in a dynamic environment of considerable uncertainty, such that...

Financial regulation should be countercyclical, strengthening during speculative booms to contain excessive leverage and loosening following crises so as to not limit credit extension in hard times. And yet, financial regulation in fact tends to be procyclical, strengthening following crises and...