Is the harmonization of financial regulatory regimes possible in East Asia? Focusing on corporate governance, which many see as a critical part of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and which is also seen as unresponsive to calls for change, this paper argues that such harmonization is possible,...

Is the harmonization of financial regulatory regimes possible in East Asia? Focusing on corporate governance, which many see as a critical part of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and which is also seen as unresponsive to calls for change, this paper argues that such harmonization is possible,...

The pricing of global commodities has come to rely heavily on the role of financial institutions and derivative instruments in recent years. The financial crisis and the increasing volatility of commodity prices, however, exposed the weaknesses of physical and financial commodity markets. In...

In this paper, we show that too strong investor protection may harm small firms and, thus, entrepreneurial initiatives. This situation is particularly relevant in crowdinvesting, which refers to a recent financial innovation originating on the Internet. In general, securities regulation offers...

This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in...

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...

We study a model where some investors ("hedgers") are bad at information processing, while others ("speculators") have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from trading,...

This study of initial public offerings (IPOs) carried out on the Berlin and London stock exchanges between 1900 and 1913 casts doubt on the received "law and finance" wisdom that legally mandated investor protection is pivotal to the development of capital markets. IPOs that resulted in official...

The concept of regulatory systemic risk – a long-term imbalance, resulting from the misalignment between regulatory initiatives and market realities, that impacts multiple areas of the regulatory framework – is developed in the context of US securities regulation. The discussion offers two...

Contrary to rumors that the Dodd-Frank Act is an incoherent mess, its 2,319 pages have two very clear objectives: limiting the risk of the shadow banking system by more carefully regulating derivatives and large financial institutions; and limiting the damage caused by a financial institution's...