Events 2014-2015

February 27, 2015

• Davis, Polk & Wardwell LLP, New York City

December 18, 2014

• Tel Aviv University, Israel

November 12, 2014

• Geoffrey Hodgson, Research Professor in Business Studies
, University of Hertfordshire

Legal theorists and other commentators have long established a distinction between property and possession. According to this usage adopted here, possession refers to control of a resource, but property involves legally sanctioned rights. Strikingly, much of the ‘the economics of property rights’ literature concentrates on possession, ignoring or downplaying the issue of legitimate legal rights. Some authors in this genre make a distinction between ‘economic rights’ and ‘legal rights’ where the former are more to do with possession or the capacity to control, rather than any right. They argue that ‘economic rights’ are primary and more relevant for understanding behaviour. But it is argued here that legal factors – involving recognition of authority and perceived justice or morality – have also to be brought into the picture to understand human motivation, even in the economic sphere. As other authors including Hernando De Soto (2000) have pointed out, the neglect of the legal infrastructure that buttresses property has major deleterious implications, including a failure to understand the role of property in supporting collateralized loans for innovation and economic development.

November 11, 2014

• Co-sponsored by: Program for Financial Studies

Martin Schroeter 

• Senior Vice President and CFO, IBM

Laurie Simon Hodrick

• A Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Business and Founding Director and Chair of the Advisory Board, Program for Financial Studies

Jesse J. Greene, Jr.

• Senior Fellow at the Richman Center, moderated the panel discussion following presentations by Laurie Simon Hodrick and Martin Schroeter.

How should a profitable corporation allocate its capital? How much should it hold for reinvestment and how much should be returned shareholders?  Let’s find out how a $163B market cap corporation looks at this important topic. Join us for a discussion with Martin Schroeter, Senior Vice President and CFO of IBM.  IBM has returned a healthy proportion of its earnings to shareholders over the last decade, through stock buybacks and dividends.  At the same time, IBM has tripled net income over the same period by investing heavily in key growth areas such as analytics, cloud computing and security. This strategy has attracted major value investors, including Warren Buffet.

To provide the foundation for this discussion, Professor Laurie Simon Hodrick, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Business and Founding Director and Chair of the Advisory Board, Program for Financial Studies at Columbia Business School, educated the group on the fundamentals of capital allocation, and joined the dialogue.

November 6, 2014

• Co-sponsored by: European Legal Studies Center

Leading experts and practitioners gathered on November 6 to discuss the regulatory environment since the 2008 financial crisis. Sheila C. Bair, the former chair of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and current chair of The Systemic Risk Council; Paul Tucker, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and current senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School; and Greg Baer, general counsel at JPMorgan Chase all contributed to the panel discussions.

Photos

November 5, 2014    

• Co-sponsored by: Deming Center Columbia Business School

Dave Bozeman

• Senior Vice President, Caterpillar Enterprise Systems

Tom Groos, Partner

• City Light Capital

Nelson Fraiman

• Professor of Professional Practice and Director Deming Center, Columbia Business School

Jesse J. Greene, Jr.,

• Senior Fellow at the Richman Center, moderated the panel discussion following an engaging presentation by Dave Bozeman on Caterpillar's strategy for staying competitive.

Can U.S. manufacturers compete against Asian and Latin American labor markets? You bet they can! Caterpillar proves it every day by exporting some of the world’s largest  equipment – used in mining, construction, transportation and power generation – and designed and built right here in the United States. Find out how Caterpillar’s Built for It® and how U.S. manufacturers stay competitive in an ever changing, global business environment.

October 17, 2014

On October 17, the Richman Center and Robert L. Lieff organized the 8th annual Global Justice Forum. The focus was on Income Inequality and the panels of experts explored the economic forces behind inequality as well as the impact of economic, judicial and regulatory policy in addressing the issue. Kenneth Feinberg, Founder and Managing Partner, Feinberg Rozen LLP, Alan Krueger, Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University and former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Brazil's Vice Minister, General-Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil, Diogo Sant'Ana, enriched the conversation with their unique perspectives.

October 8, 2014

• Kimberly Krawiec, Professor of Law, 
Duke University

Topic for Discussion:

• "Reverse Transplant Tourism"

In this article, we propose a novel form of kidney swap, which we label “Reverse Transplant Tourism.” This proposal has the potential to increase the number of successful transplants in the US at a time of great need, while reducing costs. It also will provide benefits to impoverished international patients with willing, compatible donors who otherwise would have no access to transplantation. Instead of non-US kidney donors being offered money through a black market middleman in exchange for one of their kidneys, Reverse Transplant Tourism would provide a legal and ethical exchange of living donor kidneys through kidney-paired donation. In this way, the donors will not receive money for their kidneys, but rather will receive a transplant for someone they love, while also helping a US pair who would otherwise be unable to transplant due to biological incompatibility.

October 1, 2014

• Gerard Hertig, Professor of Law
, ETH Zurich

Topic for Discussion:

• "Formal vs. Informal Bank Resolution"

The credit crisis has generated much debate on the bailout or resolution of larger banks. By contrast, little attention has been paid to resolution procedures being generally circumvented when it comes to smaller banks. We describe how supervisory leniency and political considerations often result in public officials ‘incentivizing’ viable banks to acquire smaller, failing banks and show how this weakens supervision, distorts competition, and gives resolution a bad name.

Recent reforms have provided EU authorities with significant incentives to follow formal resolution procedures rather than to operate in their shadow, but this is much less the case at the Member state level. We propose a step‐by‐step approach to get national authorities to subject smaller banks to timely resolution, especially in ‘good’ non‐financial crisis times.

September 17, 2014

• Eilis Ferran, Professor of Company and Securities Law
, St. Catharine's College, University of Cambridge

Topic for Discussion:

• "European Banking Union and the EU Single Financial Market: More Differentiated Integration, or Disintegration?"

European Banking Union (EBU) provides an important new context in which to examine how differentiation affects integration. This chapter considers: (1) the short to medium term appeal of EBU participation for Member States that do not use the euro (centripetal effects); and (ii) the potential over the same time horizon for EBU to lead to disorderly break-up of the EU (centrifugal effects). On (1), EBU pushes the boundaries of legal technology with a view to maximising the functional equivalence between euro Member States, whose participation is compulsory, and the non-euro Member States that choose to participate in EBU via a close cooperation agreement. The early indications that some non-euro Member States do want to join EBU notwithstanding certain lingering differences between their position and that of euro area Member States provide an encouraging sign as to the value of those efforts. But whilst fair participation terms are necessary, they are not a sufficient precondition to the exercise of the option to participate in EBU. Each non-euro Member State will make its own wide-ranging political calculations on whether there are net welfare gains from EBU and in doing so will take due account of the policy preferences of private and public stakeholders, which may pull in different directions. The full extent of the centripetal effect of EBU is therefore hard to predict but it is certainly a new force to be reckoned with. On (2), the chapter reaches a cautiously optimistic prognosis. The legal safeguards in EBU to address disintegration risks are not a permanent solution to the problem of certain Member States being intent upon remaining outside deeper integration in the monetary and economic sphere but nor are they merely fleeting or stopgap measures. The chapter identifies compelling economic incentives for all Member States to make these safeguards work and to resist destructive behaviour.

September 15, 2014

• John Armour, Hogan Lovells Professor of Law and Finance, University of Oxford
• Discussion Topic: "Structural Regulation of Banking"

European Banking Union (EBU) provides an important new context in which to examine how differentiation affects integration. This chapter considers: (1) the short to medium term appeal of EBU participation for Member States that do not use the euro (centripetal effects); and (ii) the potential over the same time horizon for EBU to lead to disorderly break-up of the EU (centrifugal effects). On (1), EBU pushes the boundaries of legal technology with a view to maximising the functional equivalence between euro Member States, whose participation is compulsory, and the non-euro Member States that choose to participate in EBU via a close cooperation agreement. The early indications that some non-euro Member States do want to join EBU notwithstanding certain lingering differences between their position and that of euro area Member States provide an encouraging sign as to the value of those efforts. But whilst fair participation terms are necessary, they are not a sufficient precondition to the exercise of the option to participate in EBU. Each non-euro Member State will make its own wide-ranging political calculations on whether there are net welfare gains from EBU and in doing so will take due account of the policy preferences of private and public stakeholders, which may pull in different directions. The full extent of the centripetal effect of EBU is therefore hard to predict but it is certainly a new force to be reckoned with. On (2), the chapter reaches a cautiously optimistic prognosis. The legal safeguards in EBU to address disintegration risks are not a permanent solution to the problem of certain Member States being intent upon remaining outside deeper integration in the monetary and economic sphere but nor are they merely fleeting or stopgap measures. The chapter identifies compelling economic incentives for all Member States to make these safeguards work and to resist destructive behavior.