No one played a more vital role responding to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression than a small band of state attorneys general (AGs). Yet this story has never been told nor its implications considered. For more than a decade these AGs brought enforcement actions across the...

Empirical evidence suggests that widespread financial distress, by disrupting enforcement of credit contracts, can be self-propagatory and adversely affect the supply of credit. We propose a unifying theory that models the interplay between enforcement, borrower default decisions, and the...

The procyclicality hypothesis predicts that after a stock market downturn, regulatory initiatives and therefore investor protections increase. Unlike the relevant literature which focuses on new legislation, we focus on the enforcement of securities law. Our work is consistent with the idea of...

Corporate and securities laws are seen to mitigate corporate fraud by 'manipulating the incentives of agents': presenting corporate agents with a probability of being caught and punished if they commit fraud. This article suggests that the same laws also affect corporate fraud in a significant...

Section 2 of the Sherman Act bans monopolization of any part of interstate commerce. This essay draws on macroeconomic theory and the New Deal experience with partial repeal of the antitrust laws and cartelization of labor to examine the relationship between macroeconomic stability and the...