Oxford Business Law Blog

The 2007-09 financial crisis exposed numerous vulnerabilities of the financial system stemming from unprecedented (idiosyncratic) failures within individual financial institutions that collectively...

The rapid spread of Covid-19 and massive change in behavior required to curb it have transformed the trajectory of the world’s economy. Just a few short weeks ago, the United States was basking in...

The impact of technology on finance (FinTech) is one of the hottest topics in business, law, and regulation, with academics and practitioners considering many issues, including cryptocurrencies, robo...

The recent stress in financial markets caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is an important reminder that shocks do not just come from sources that are endogenous to the financial system, as in the case...

The Financial Stability Board (FSB), established in the aftermath of the crisis by the G20, is an international entity that issues standards regarding global financial system. Since 2011, every...

Artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on finance. In the span of a few decades, it has made finance faster, more accessible, more profitable, and more efficient in many ways. Despite all...

Shocks that hit part of the financial system, such as the subprime mortgage market in 2007, can propagate and amplify through the complex network of interconnections among financial and non-financial...

Since the 1990s, the Internet has become the communications channel by which an increasing number of commercial and financial transactions take place. But already in the 1990s, it was clear that the...

On October 18, federal regulators released the largest U.S. insurance group, Prudential Financial, Inc., from enhanced government oversight. Prudential had been the last remaining systemically...

The regulatory requirement for banks to hold capital is related to the safety net afforded by (often implicit) government guarantees. Regulators are also concerned about the possibility of systemic...

As knowledge of cryptocurrencies becomes more widespread, the number of the people using them grows. Their attractiveness is due in part to their decentralized, peer-to-peer structure. This makes...

Since the global financial crisis, an increasing number of countries, including the United States, have been requiring most derivatives contracts to be cleared and settled through central...

The financial crisis of 2007-2009 showed how interconnectedness among financial institutions can pose systemic risk to the financial system. When a highly interconnected institution becomes...

In a seminal work, Modigliani and Miller pointed out that, in a world with no asymmetries of information, no transaction costs, no taxes and no costs of bankruptcy, the value of the firm is...

In our recent ECGI-Law working paper, ‘The Law and Economics of Shadow Banking’, we discuss the economic case for regulating shadow banking. Our paper asks three questions. First, what is shadow...

In a new working paper, ‘The Renminbi and Systemic Risk’, I argue that the internationalization of China’s currency, the renminbi (‘RMB’), is arising in ways that depart considerably from historical...

The current debate over the future of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (and specifically, its SIFI designation power) is missing an important point. The question should not be whether the...

The modern financial system is highly interconnected. Institutions engage in a diverse range of transactions and contracts with each other. Examples include the interbank lending market and the over-...

A bit of comparative analysis, like this, might help us think about these questions. Across the EU, the US and (at least until the impact of Brexit is felt) the UK, we see varying degrees of...

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’, I mean broadly...