The global financial crisis demonstrated the inability and unwillingness of financial market participants to safeguard the stability of the financial system. It also highlighted the enormous direct and indirect costs of addressing systemic crises after they have occurred, as opposed to...

In a management buyout (MBO), the managers of a company typically partner with a financing source, such as a private equity firm, to acquire the firm that employs them. MBOs raise an important corporate governance concern not present in other corporate acquisitions: managers act as fiduciaries...

We briefly introduce the financial crisis and the role played by mortgage-backed securities. Then we describe the controversy at issue: whether, in order to own and enforce the mortgage loans backing those securities, a special-purpose vehicle “purchasing” mortgage loans must take physical...

The recent financial woes of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and other nations have reinvigorated the debate over whether to bail out defaulting countries or, instead, restructure their debt. Bailouts are expensive, both for residents of the nation being bailed out and for parties providing the...

The BP Gulf oil spill and the Toyota car recalls have highlighted an important legal anomaly that has been overlooked by scholars — judicial inconsistency and confusion in ruling whether to compensate for the loss in market value of wrongfully affected property. This article seeks to...

Although microfinance is emerging as a key tool to alleviate poverty, the need for microfinance lending vastly exceeds the amount of funds that can be raised from charitable donors. Commercial bank lending is supplementing donor money, but microfinance loans made by banks are extremely expensive...