How should we think about regulating our dynamically changing financial system? Existing regulatory approaches have two temporal flaws. The obvious flaw, driven by politics and human nature (and addressed in other writings), is that financial regulation is overly reactive to past crises. This...

In an earlier article, I argued that shadow banking — the provision of financial services and products outside of the traditional banking system, and thus without the need for bank intermediation between capital markets and the users of funds — is so radically transforming finance that...

Although secured transactions traditionally are regulated to protect transacting parties and to make the transactions themselves more efficient, the financial crisis has revealed that regulation should also protect the stability of the financial system. This raises numerous future challenges....

This chapter provides a basic overview of banking and financial regulation for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics (Francesco Parisi, ed.). Among other things, the chapter compares traditional and shadow banking and their regulation, differentiating “microprudential”...

The coronavirus has produced a public health debacle of the first-order. But the virus is also propagating the kind of exogenous shock that can precipitate – and to a considerable degree is already precipitating – a systemic event for our financial system. This currently unfolding systemic...

Complexity is the greatest challenge to 21st Century financial regulation, having the potential to impair markets and investments in several interrelated ways. Furthermore, complexity can cause failures that individual market participants cannot, or will not have incentive to, remedy. These...

Although microfinance is emerging as a key tool to alleviate poverty, the need for microfinance lending vastly exceeds the amount of funds that can be raised from charitable donors. Commercial bank lending is supplementing donor money, but microfinance loans made by banks are extremely expensive...