Third-party funding is an arrangement whereby an outside entity finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration. The outside entity — called a “third-party funder” — could be a bank, hedge fund, insurance company, or some other entity or individual that...

In this paper we use a signaling model to analyze the effect of (endogenously-determined) third-party non-recourse loans to plaintiffs on settlement bargaining when a plaintiff has private information about the value of her suit. We show that an optimal loan (i.e., one that maximizes the joint...

This article addresses recent developments in third-party funding that occurred during late 2012 and early 2013 in the three leading jurisdictions: Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The most important developments are the following. On 22 April 2013, the Australian Securities...

Basic economic analysis of litigation funding shows that risk neutral plaintiffs without budget constraints will not accept funding unless they are pessimistic relative to the funder. Risk aversion makes a plaintiff who shares probabilistic beliefs with the funder act observationally equivalent...

On paper, class actions run like clockwork. But practice suggests the need for tune-ups: sometimes judges still approve settlements rife with red flags, and professional objectors may be more concerned with shaking down class counsel than with improving class members' outcomes. The lack of data...

Competition litigation is often complex, lengthy, and expensive. The developments in European countries show that there is an increasing demand for litigation funding, especially with the rise of collective damages actions in competition law. The experience with litigation funding differs...

This Article offers a broad theory of what distinguishes investment funds from ordinary companies, with ramifications for how these funds are understood and regulated. The central claim is that investment funds (i.e., mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity funds and their cousins) are...

Experience teaches that the Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) will need a financing facility if it is to garner widespread acceptance among low-income countries. The promise of financing is a well-established carrot to encourage countries to assume new convention-imposed obligations...

In this paper I investigate the investment behavior of SRI investors based on SRI mutual fund flows. Specifically, I analyze how SRI investors react to past performance and ethical standards. This empirical study shows that over the years along with the development of the SRI fund market, the...

Traditional risk-adjusted performance measures, such as the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor index or Jensen’s alpha, based on the mean-variance framework, are widely used to rank mutual funds. However, performance measures that consider risk by taking into account only losses, such as Value-at-Risk...