Registering originative business contracts allows entrepreneurs and creditors to choose, and courts to enforce market-friendly “contract” rules that protect innocent third parties when adjudicating disputes on subsequent contracts. This reduces information asymmetry for third parties, which...

The firm can be seen as a centralization of market transactions and as a decentralization of a public ordering which allows the management of joint liabilities. The paper advances the view that the main reason for the firm’s existence is the unification and the internalization of liabilities....

Text presented at the 19ª Asamblea Anual del Grupo Regional de América Latina y el Caribe (GRULAC), of the World Savings Banks Institute, La Habana, Cuba, 4-5 November 2013. It mentions some of the more recent international reform initiatives in particular those linked to the Basel Committee...

In the past decades, the number of sources of pollution has increased and their consequences on the lives of humans, plants, and animals are ever more alarming. Numerous personalities in the entire world draw the attention on the present unprecedented aggression against the environment. Romania,...

Due to judicial decisions the stock market prices are deemed to be the lower value limit in determining the compensations within structural measures according to German stock corporation law (e.g. squeeze-out of minority stockholders). By applying other valuation methods, in particular the...

In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty voters — investors whose voting...

We investigate whether homeowners respond strategically to news of mortgage modification programs. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in modification policy induced by settlement of U.S. state government lawsuits against Countrywide Financial Corporation, which agreed to offer...