For capital markets to function, political institutions must support capitalism in general and the capitalism of financial markets in particular. Yet capital markets' shape, support, and extent are often contested in the polity. Powerful elements — from politicians to mass popular movements...

Strong financial markets are widely thought to propel economic development, with many in finance seeing legal tradition as fundamental to protecting investors sufficiently for finance to flourish. Kenneth Dam, in the Law-Growth Nexus, finds that the legal tradition view inaccurately portrays how...

Much has been written and discussed in banking circles about recent rollbacks in prudential regulation, with some seeing the rollbacks as unsafe and others seeing them as allowing stronger financial action. Undiscussed is that the basic taxation of the corporation in the United States—and...

The Trust Indenture Act prohibits a binding vote of bondholders to change any core term-principal amount, interest rate, or maturity date-of a bond issue. In this Article, I show how the prohibition on a collective action clause inhibits a troubled company's ability to reorganize outside of...

Corporate governance incentives at too-big-to-fail financial firms deserve systematic examination. For industrial conglomerates that have grown too large to be efficient, internal and external corporate structural pressures push to resize the firm. External activists press the firm to...

Chrysler, a failing auto manufacturer, was reorganized in a controversial chapter 11 in 2009. Financial creditors were paid a quarter of the amount owed them, while other creditors were paid more. The reorganization's defenders asserted, among other things, that the proceeding and the sale...