Few doubt that executive compensation arrangements encouraged the excessive risk taking by banks that led to the recent Financial Crisis. Accordingly, academics and lawmakers have called for the reform of banker pay practices. In this Article, we argue that regulator pay is to blame as well, and...

In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate....

Investigations into the recent financial crisis have found that banking regulators knew or should have known of many of the problems that would ultimately cripple the finance industry. We argue that their failure to address those problems prior to the crisis was at least partly due to misaligned...

This Article proposes an alternative to direct government regulation of mortgage brokers: self-regulation of the mortgage industry that mimics the arguably successful self-regulation of the securities industry that has occurred over the past two centuries. Although not without its problems,...

Observers of our federal republic have long acknowledged that a fourth branch of government comprising administrative agencies has arisen to join the original three established by the Constitution. In this article, we focus our attention on the emergence of perhaps yet another, comprising...

According to the conventional wisdom, credit derivative contracts are a form of insurance. This view is held by academics, pundits, journalists, and government officials. This essay shows why they are wrong. While there is some superficial similarity between some kinds of credit derivative...

This essay introduces the papers presented at a conference at the University of Chicago Law School in June 2008, entitled quot;The Going Private Phenomenon: Causes and Implications.quot; The papers will be published in a forthcoming volume of the University of Chicago Law Review. This...

Conventional wisdom suggests that high agency costs explain the (excessive) amounts and (inefficient) forms of CEO compensation. This paper offers a simple empirical test of this claim and the reform proposals that follow from it, by looking at pay practices in firms under financial distress,...