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Corporate governance, the internal policies and leadership that guide the actions of corporations, played a major part in the recent global financial crisis. While much blame has been targeted at compensation arrangements that rewarded extreme risk-taking but did not punish failure, the performance of large, supposedly sophisticated institutional investors in this crisis has gone for the most part unexamined. Shareholding organizations, such as pension funds and mutual funds, hold considerable sway over the financial industry from Wall Street to the City of London. Corporate Governance Failures: The Role of Institutional Investors in the Global Financial Crisis exposes the misdeeds and lapses of these institutional investors leading up to the recent economic meltdown.In this collection of original essays, edited by pioneers in the field of fiduciary capitalism, top legal and financial practitioners and researchers discuss detrimental actions and inaction of institutional investors. Corporate Governance Failures reveals how these organizations exposed themselves and their clientele to extremely complex financial instruments, such as credit default swaps, through investments in hedge and private equity funds as well as more traditional equity investments in large financial institutions. The book's contributors critique fund executives for tolerating the \"pursuit of alpha\" culture that led managers to pursue risky financial strategies in hopes of outperforming the market. The volume also points out how and why institutional investors failed to effectively monitor such volatile investments, ignoring relatively well-established corporate governance principles and best practices.Along with detailed investigations of institutional investor missteps, Corporate Governance Failures offers nuanced and realistic proposals to mitigate future financial pitfalls. This volume provides fresh perspectives on ways institutional investors can best act as gatekeepers and promote responsible investment.

Financial markets, the banking system, and the real estate, commodity and energy markets have, since 2007, been experiencing higher integration, more volatility and have undergone several shocks. More coordination is needed between G20 and market authorit.

Bringing financial literacy to Washington / Peter R. Fisher -- Measuring and managing federal financial risk: a view from the hill / Donald B. Marron -- The cost of risk to the government and its implications for federal budgeting / Deborah Lucas and Marvin Phaup -- Comment: Henning Bohn -- Federal financial exposure to natural catastrophe risk / J. David Cummins, Michael Suher, and George Zanjani -- Comment: Greg Niehaus -- Housing policy, mortgage policy, and the Federal Housing Administration / Dwight M. Jaffee and John M. Quigley -- Comment: Susan M. Wachter -- Valuing government guarantees: Fannie and Freddie revisited / Deborah Lucas and Robert Mcdonald -- Comment: Alan J. Marcus -- Guaranteed vs. direct lending: the case of student loans / Deborah Lucas and Damien Moore -- Comment: Janice C. Eberly -- Market valuation of accrued social security benefits / John Geanakoplos and Stephen P. Zeldes -- Environmental assets and liabilities: dealing with catastrophic risks / Geoffrey Heal and Howard Kunreuther -- Comment: William Pizer.

Legal and financial practitioners and researchers investigate the role of institutional investors in the corporate governance failures that contributed to the recent global financial crisis. The authors also offer proposals to mitigate future pitfalls. This volume covers alternative financial investments, systemic risk, and responsible investment.

Six leading economists examine the financing of corporate capital formation in the U.S. economy. In clear and nontechnical terms, their papers provide valuable information for economists and nonspecialists interested in such questions as why interest rates are so high, why corporate debt has accelerated in recent years, and how government debt affects private financial markets. Addressing these questions, the contributors focus chiefly on three themes: the actual use of debt and equity financing by corporations in recent years; the factors that drive the financial markets' pricing of debt and equity securities; and the relationship between corporations' real investment decisions and their financial decisions. While some of the papers are primarily expository, others break new ground. Extending his previous work, Robert Taggart finds a closer relationship between corporate and government debt than has been supposed. Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, and Robert McDonald conclude in their study that the volatility of interest rates under the Volcker regime has led to a rise in real interest rates because of investors' demand for a greater risk premium. All of the papers present empirical findings in a useful analytical framework. For its new findings and for its expert overview of issues central to an understanding of the U.S. economy, Financing Corporate Capital Formation should be of both historical and practical interest to students of economics and practitioners in the corporate and financial community.

Financial markets, the banking system, and the real estate, commodity and energy markets have, since 2007, been experiencing higher integration, more volatility and have undergone several shocks. More coordination is needed between G20 and market authorit.

The U.S. government is the world's largest financial institution, providing credit and assuming risk through diverse activities. But the potential cost and risk of these actions and obligations remain poorly understood and only partially measured. Government budgetary and financial accounting rules, which largely determine the information available to federal decision makers, have only just begun to address these issues. However, recently there has been a push to rethink how these programs are valued and accounted for, and some progress has been made in applying modern valuation methods-such a

The distinction between uncertainty and risk, originally drawn by Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes in the 1920s, remains fundamentally important today. In the presence of uncertainty, market actors and economic policy-makers substitute other methods of decision making for rational calculation—specifically, actors' decisions are rooted in social conventions. Drawing from innovations in financial markets and deliberations among top American monetary authorities in the years before the 2008 crisis, we show how economic actors and policy-makers live in worlds of risk and uncertainty. In that world social conventions deserve much greater attention than conventional IPE analyses accords them. Such conventions must be part of our toolkit as we seek to understand the preferences and strategies of economic and political actors.

This paper tests the proposition that politicians and their affiliated firms (i.e., firms operating in their province) temporarily suppress negative information in response to political incentives. We examine the stock price behavior of Chinese listed firms around two visible political events—meetings of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party and promotions of high-level provincial politicians—that are expected to asymmetrically increase the costs of releasing bad news. The costs create an incentive for local politicians and their affiliated firms to temporarily restrict the flow of negative information about the companies. The result will be fewer stock price crashes for the affiliated firms during these event windows, followed by an increase in crashes after the event. Consistent with these predictions, we find that the affiliated firms experience a reduction (an increase) in negative stock return skewness before (after) the event. These effects are strongest in the three-month period directly preceding the event, among firms that are more politically connected, and when the province is dominated by faction politics and cronyism. Additional tests document a significant reduction in published newspaper articles about affected firms in advance of these political events, suggestive of a link between our observed stock price behavior and temporary shifts in the listed firms' information environment.

Events like the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), Georgetown symposium demonstrate that there is much to be learned through the sharing of experiences and thinking together about the critical issues that confront our industry as well as new products and ideas. MIGA opened a new Asian hub in Singapore with underwriters in Hong Kong SAR, China and business development staff in Beijing and Tokyo. This hub aims to capitalize on Asian emerging as a new center of outbound investment growth. We have seen a growing base of investors in China as well as other Asian countries looking to go into the challenging market. MIGA also opened a business development office in Paris, which will focus on new business opportunities in Europe as well as the Middle East and North Africa. We view both of these hubs as providing an excellent opportunity for MIGA to support the economic growth of low-income countries through providing the support to South-South investments. Providing political risk insurance (PRI) for outbound investment from the rich and other middle-income countries has become more important as the level of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) growth from these countries has increased.