By treating derivatives and financial repurchase agreements much more favorably than it treats other financial vehicles, American bankruptcy law subsidizes these arrangements relative to other financing channels. By subsidizing them, the rules weaken market discipline during ordinary financial...

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...

Corporate structures differ among the advanced economies of the world. We contribute to an understanding of these differences by developing a theory of the path dependence of corporate structure. The corporate structures that an economy has at any point in time depend in part on those that it...

A strong theory has emerged that the quality of corporate law primarily determines whether ownership and control separate, particularly to the extent law stymies controllers' self-dealing transactions that damage minority stockholders. But in several rich nations, shareholders seem...

To fully understand governance and authority in the large corporation, one must attend to politics. Because basic dimensions of corporate organization can affect the interests of voters, because powerful concentrated interest groups seek particular outcomes that deeply affect large corporations,...

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...