Oxford Business Law Blog

The 2008 financial crisis set off a major debate about the role of accounting for financial stability. Politicians, policymakers and commentators were quick to point to fair-value or mark-to-market...

‘Too big to fail’—or ‘TBTF’—is a popular metaphor for a core dysfunction of today’s financial system: the recurrent pattern of government bailouts of large, systemically important financial...

A keynote policy of UK financial regulation since the financial crisis has been the ‘ring-fencing’ of retail banks into separate and independently operated entities, so-called ‘ring-fenced bodies’ (...

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, now ten years ago, was neither the start nor the peak of the financial crisis. Yet, the demise of the iconic investment bank, the fourth-largest in the United...

Following the great financial crisis in 2008, preventing future bail-outs for large, systemically important banks while minimizing the repercussions of bank insolvencies on the stability of the...

A question I am asked as frequently as any other is: 'Why didn’t anyone go to jail for the financial crisis?' There was huge suffering, sufficient misbehavior that the largest banks had to pay well...

The aftermath of the financial crisis revealed failures and gaps in regulatory actions. In particular, regulators have been criticized for serving special interests—not only of the banks they...

In September 2013, on the fifth anniversary of the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, The Economist decided that one of the interesting ways to revisit the crisis was by focusing on its “winner”:...

A new and influential economic literature places much of the blame for the global financial crisis on so-called ‘safe assets,’ debt contracts that investors treat as if they had very low risk...

Consumer protection regulation creates a level playing field for vulnerable categories of consumers against potential abuses by service providers. Legislators around the globe regulate service...

'Bank Resolution Regimes: What Next?' is a one-day conference that examines the new bank resolution regime under the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive and the new requirements that banks have to...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that short selling triggers financial crises or exacerbates market-wide stock price crash risk. Short sellers are often treated as scapegoats and held responsible for the...

Last year, bank prosecutions dominated federal corporate prosecutions in a way never before seen in the United States. In a recent paper, I describe how, before 2008, prosecutions of banks had been...

After the financial crisis many scholars, commentators and practitioners have focused on what is seen as a culture of self-interestedness in the finance industry and a devil-may-care attitude to the...

From the late 1990s through 2008, the United States experienced the largest boom-and- bust cycle in its securities and housing markets since the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great Depression. Scholars...

People tend to attribute the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis to deregulation. In my paper ‘From the Great Depression to the Great Recession: On the Failure of Regulation in the Mortgage Market...

Many studies on bank performance have tried to understand underperformance during financial crises, particularly compared to their banking peers. For example, Fahlenbrach, Prilmeier, and Stulz (2012...