This study is an exercise in theory building. It begins from the premise that current theory with respect to the setting of accounting standards is inadequate. We advance current theory by incorporating new ideas from sociology (issues network theory, see Heclos, 1978) and social psychology...

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...

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, Congress has sought to regulate the proprietary trading activities of Wall Street banks. The Volcker Rule, passed into law as section 619 of the Dodd-Frank Act, bans proprietary trading for deposit-taking banks and bank holding companies with...

This paper presents summary statistics and a preliminary analysis of the success rate of loan modifications made in 2010 and January 2011 to residential mortgages securitized in private-label residential mortgage-backed securities. We find that these more recent private-label loan modifications...

Commercial law is not a single, monolithic entity. It has grown into a dense thicket of subject-specific branches that govern a broad range of transactions and corporate actions. When one of these events falls concurrently within the purview of two or more of these commercial law branches - such...

This article seeks to contribute to the discussion concerning the adequacy of the legal responses to conflicts of interest in institutional asset management. After defining the legal concept of a conflict of interest in general, the insights of economic theory, especially agency theory, are...

Treasury trade organizations report a sharp increase in demand of corporations wanting to manage their credit bank relationships. In doing so, these companies seek to understand the risk adjusted capital that credit banks must reserve against their fee based and credit based business, and the...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are huge, fast-growing, highly leveraged, lightly regulated, and susceptible to failure. Prudence calls for having a legal mechanism adequate for handling their failure. Yet no adequate insolvency mechanism currently exists for them. Unlike ordinary business firms,...

After the Great Recession, new regulatory interventions were introduced to protect consumers and reduce the costs of financial products. Some voiced concern that direct price regulation was unlikely to help consumers, because banks offset losses in one domain by increasing the prices that they...

The working hypothesis of international financial regulation is that it should be globally harmonized. This paper contends, to the contrary, that we should be wary about the efficacy of global harmonization, and in particular, harmonization of systemic risk measurement and regulation. The thesis...