We analyze the consequences of activism in a regulated industry where the regulator has been captured by the industry. Unlike ordinary economic agents, activists are insensitive to monetary incentives. Moreover, they are less well informed than regulators and their actions generate dead-weight...

From its inception, the federal securities law regime created and enforced a major divide between public and private capital raising. Firms that chose to “go public” took on substantial disclosure burdens, but in exchange were given the exclusive right to raise capital from the general...

The long awaited first Act of China Private International Law, Law of Application of Law for Foreign-related Civil Relations of People's Republic of China (LALFCR), was adopted on October 28 2010, and will come into force on April 1 2011. Unprecedented, the legislation of China expresses its...

In this essay we survey the literature on the theory of privatisation. We look at two periods defined by their relationship to the theory of the firm. In the period up to 1990 the literature followed the theory of the firm in using a complete or comprehensive contracting modelling framework. By...

Almost all theorizing about law, including the rule of law, begins with government. Analysts from a wide variety of perspectives make this presumption. We contest this presumption. In this paper, we ask whether rule of law is an equilibrium in the absence of private ordering. To address this...

This study of the performance of state-owned enterprises in Serbia has shown that the state has great difficulties managing the enterprises that are in its portfolio and under its control. The adaptation of state-owned enterprises to exogenous shocks unfolds at a slow pace and is faced with many...

We propose a security design model in which a potential acquirer approaches a firm with a value-add plan. The target has a single owner, who possesses private information: he knows whether his firm is compatible with the plan, or not. The seller agrees the acquirer will add value but not as much...

With the help of lab experiments we study the impact of discharging insolvent debtors of their residual debt. We investigate the impact of different participation rules and the impact of different types of lenders. We find that higher participation rates encourage risk taking behaviour of...

We consider a situation where an agent's effort is monitored by a supervisor who cares for the agent's well being. This is modeled by incorporating the agent's utility into the utility function of the supervisor. The first best solution can be implemented even if the supervisor's preferences are...