Subject: L&E Colloquium for 10/2: Kate Judge on Shadow Banking
From: Brian Galle <[email-masked]>
To: Law Faculty and Visitors <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 18:00:58 +0000

Greetings, colleagues.  This Friday's guest at the L&E colloquium will be Kate Judge of Columbia Law School.  Kate is presenting a paper called "Information Gaps," a title that seems to me to leave a large information gap about its paper's contents.  Where is the colon?  The extra three phrases of descriptions?  Here's the abstract instead:

A financial system is fragile when small shocks can trigger large effects.  The 2007-2009 financial crisis revealed the shadow banking system to be exceptionally fragile and capable of bringing down the rest of the financial system, yet the reasons for this fragility remain incompletely understood.  This paper provides new insights into the mechanisms through which small shocks can trigger significant market dysfunction in the shadow banking system and the challenges impeding efforts to design a regulatory regime capable of supporting shadow banking.
This paper argues that information gaps-pockets of pertinent and knowable information that is not actually known to any party, private or public-contribute to fragility and help to explain the systemic risk posed by shadow banking.  It makes two claims.  First, there are structural reasons to expect sizeable information gaps in the shadow banking system.  Second, those information gaps make panics more likely and exacerbate the magnitude of market dysfunction likely to arise from a panic.
In undertaking the structural analysis required to identify information gaps, the paper also sheds light on why attempts to reform the shadow banking system have been so contentious and unproductive thus far.  The shadow banking system is a true hybrid.  It earns its "shadow" status because it operates in the capital markets, and therefore outside the prudential regulatory regime that governs banks.  Yet it also merits its status as a "banking system" because it performs many of the economic functions historically fulfilled by the banking system and poses similar threats to systemic stability.  In situating the shadow banking system at the nexus of these two historically distinct regimes, the analysis helps explain why policymakers and other experts often come to the table with different, and sometimes contradictory, assumptions about how markets work and how regulation can most effectively promote market functioning.  By laying this foundation, clarifying how shadow banking contributes to fragility, and identifying ways to reduce that fragility, the paper also forges the beginnings of a more productive path forward.
Please join us Friday at noon in Hotung 2001 to discuss the aesthetics of titles, the mysteries of modern finance, and all the points of intersection thereof.  Also, please let me know if you would be interested in joining the speaker for dinner at 6 on Friday evening.
BDG
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Brian Galle
Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center
(202) 662-4039
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=332937