Predatory lending, the origination of loans with abusive terms to homeowners, is rampant in the subprime mortgage market. In the last few years, many states responded to this problem by enacting consumer protection laws. Large segments of the lending industry have opposed these laws. In large...

A pitched battle is currently being waged for control of the American banking industry. For over a hundred years, the federal and state governments have maintained a complex, but relatively stable truce in their contest for power. At the beginning of our republic, state governments were the...

This paper studies the rating activities developed on the Swiss financial market and gives an overview of the agencies operating in Switzerland. It analyses the role and functions exercised by rating agencies and other entities like banks establishing and publishing own ratings on that...

This article was my contribution to the Symposium Professor Hillary Sale at Iowa organized to celebrate Robert C. Clark's treatise, Corporate Law. This abstract is taken from the review essay of the Symposium by Professors Ronald Gilson and Reinier Kraakman, 31 Iowa J. Corp. L. at 606, and is an...

This article contributes to the new governance literature by analyzing how private parties profit from standards. Scholars previously have focused on what I call first-order profits from the right to extract rent directly from the ownership or application of standards. But some parties also make...

Whether a customer pays with cash, check, PIN- or signature-based debit card, or credit card, the transactions costs imposed on the merchant differ widely, but credit card networks' no-surcharge rules prevent the merchant from passing those different costs along to the customer. These...

In this paper, we examine changes in financial instruments and institutions by contrasting the successes and failures of institutional shareholder activism during the 1990s with more recent developments in hedge fund activism and the use of financial innovation. We find that although...

This essay demonstrates through the Superior Bank failure how an administrative agency, the FDIC, can act without taking into account what is fair and just for all involved parties, instead maximizing its power or its economic recovery. The author argues that the FDIC lost sight of how it should...

The widespread use computer-based risk models in the financial industry in the last two decades enabled the marketing of more complex financial products to consumers, the growth of securitization and derivatives, and the development of sophisticated risk management strategies by financial...

This study explores whether economic incentives exist for mortgage lenders to minimize mortgage originations in neighborhoods inhabited primarily by low-income racial minorities. Using an option pricing model, we show how the market value of a mortgage is affected by specific borrower...