One of the great ironies of the financial meltdown of 2008 – which was really more of a values meltdown – is that very few U.S. laws were actually broken. This paper investigates the financial crisis from a different legal perspective – that of Jewish law, using six framing principles:...

The authors posit that one should not take a binary approach to business ethics because there are gradations. They propose that firms may be classified according to the following metric: Level I: The Totally Unethical Organization; Level II: The Legalistic Unethical Organization; Level III: The...

Companies that are going to thrive must have a soul. Those that are only concerned with “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “maximizing profit” will find themselves going the way Enron went. CEOs will have to lead the revolution and should be the ones exhorting executives to make...

The current financial crisis that threatens the entire world has created an ideal opportunity for educators. A number of important lessons can be learned from this financial meltdown. Some are technical and deal with the value of mathematical models and measuring risk. The most important lesson,...

The seeds for the 2007-09 financial collapse were sewn over many years and nurtured by ill-advised governmental housing policy, the presence of pervasive fraud both large and small and the widespread failure of personal integrity. A chronology of bad choices made by individuals and the...

This is the sixth article in the Economists' hubris paper series, which aim to critically examine the practical applications of academic thinking. The focus of this article is business ethics, with a specific focus on the financial services industry. The main challenges that one faces in...

This chapter reviews statutory and court sanctioned private regulatory frameworks affecting the creation of private equity (PE) funds and their primary activity of acquiring corporate enterprises. The chapter reviews U.S. legislation regulating securities, investment companies, and tender...

Nothing is more common in moral debates than to invoke the names of great thinkers from the past. Business ethics is no exception. Yet insofar as business ethicists have tended to simply mine abstract formulas from the past, they have missed out on the potential intellectual gains in...

When a series of corporate scandals erupted soon after the collapse of the 1990's bull market in equities, policy makers and reformers chiefly responded by augmenting and refining the checks and balances surrounding publicly traded corporations. Through measures such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of...