The legal origins hypothesis is one of the most important and influential ideas to emerge in the social sciences in the past decade. However, the empirical base of the legal origins claim has always been contestable, as it largely consists of cross-sectional datasets which provide evidence on...

The financial crisis of 2007-9 revealed serious failings in the regulation of financial institutions and markets, and prompted a fundamental reconsideration of the design of financial regulation. As the financial system has become ever-more complex and interconnected, the pace of evolution...

Inadequate regulation of the financial system is widely thought to have contributed to the financial crisis. The purpose of the book is to articulate a framework within which financial regulation can be analysed in a coherent and comprehensive fashion. The book's approach is distinctive in...

According to a common narrative, in addition to inadequate capital and liquidity, the failure of banks in the financial crisis also reflected their poor governance. By governance we mean broadly the oversight that comes from banks' own shareholders and other stakeholders of the way in which they...

This paper, which forms part of the first phase of the New Special Study of the Securities Markets Project, explores how globalization has affected the operation of securities markets and the challenges this poses for their regulation. In Part I, we discuss how three secular trends –...