M. Todd Henderson

Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach to Regulatory Assignments

In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate. We call this “reverse regulatory arbitrage,” and we think it can help improve regulatory outcomes. Building on our prior work that proposes to pay bank examiners for performance — by giving them financial incentives to avoid bank failures — we argue that bank supervisory assignments should be set through an auction among examiners. Examiner bidding would generate information about examiners’ skills, experience and preferences, as well as information about each bank. Provided examiners bear the upside and downside of their regulatory behavior, a bidding system for regulatory assignments could improve the fit between examiners and the banks they supervise, thereby enhancing regulatory efficiency.

Paying CEOs in Bankruptcy: Executive Compensation when Agency Costs are Low

Conventional wisdom suggests that high agency costs explain the (excessive) amounts and (inefficient) forms of CEO compensation. This paper offers a simple empirical test of this claim and the reform proposals that follow from it, by looking at pay practices in firms under financial distress, where agency costs are dramatically reduced. When a firm files for Chapter 11 or privately works out its debt with lenders, sophisticated investors consolidate ownership interests into a few large positions replacing diffuse and disinterested shareholders. These investors, be they banks or vulture investors, effectively control the debtor during the reorganization process. In addition, all the other players in compensation decisions - boards, courts, and other stakeholders - play a much more active role than for healthy firms. In other words, agency costs are much lower in Chapter 11 firms. Accordingly, if pay practices look the same in bankruptcy as they do in healthy firms, we can conclude that either (1) the current practices are efficient, or (2) that proposals to change executive compensation by reducing agency costs are incomplete. The data support one of these hypotheses: amounts and forms of compensation remain largely unchanged as agency costs are reduced, and look similar to those of healthy firms.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Can Disclosure Enhance Insiders’ Trade Returns?

Can voluntary disclosure be used to enhance insiders’ strategic trade while providing legal cover? We investigate this question in the context of 10b5-1 trading plans. Prior literature suggests that insiders lose strategic trade value if their planned trades are disclosed. But disclosure might enhance strategic trade because courts can only consider publicly available evidence from defendants at the motion to dismiss phase of trial. This practice can enhance legal protection for firms that disclose planned trades, especially those disclosing detailed information. Consistent with increased legal protection, we find that voluntary disclosure of planned trades increases with firm litigation risk and potential gains to insiders’ trades. We also find that insider sales and abnormal returns are higher for disclosed plans, especially those that articulate specific plan details. This suggests that voluntary disclosure, which is conventionally thought to reduce information asymmetries, can create legal cover for opportunistic insider trading.

Pay for Regulator Performance

Few doubt that executive compensation arrangements encouraged the excessive risk taking by banks that led to the recent Financial Crisis. Accordingly, academics and lawmakers have called for the reform of banker pay practices. In this Article, we argue that regulator pay is to blame as well, and that fixing it may be easier and more effective than reforming banker pay. Regulatory failures during the Financial Crisis resulted at least in part from a lack of sufficient incentives for examiners to act aggressively to prevent excessive risk. Bank regulators are rarely paid for performance, and in atypical cases involving performance bonus programs, the bonuses have been allocated in highly inefficient ways. We propose that regulators, specifically bank examiners, be compensated with a debt-heavy mix of phantom bank equity and debt, as well as a separate bonus linked to the timing of the decision to take over a bank. Our pay-for-performance approach for regulators would help reduce the incidence of future regulatory failures.

Becoming a Fifth Branch

Observers of our federal republic have long acknowledged that a fourth branch of government comprising administrative agencies has arisen to join the original three established by the Constitution. In this article, we focus our attention on the emergence of perhaps yet another, comprising financial self-regulatory organizations. In the late eighteenth century, long before the creation of state and federal securities authorities, the financial industry created its own self-regulatory organizations. These private institutions then coexisted with the public authorities for much of the past century in a complementary array of informal and formal policing mechanisms. That equilibrium, however, appears to be growing increasingly imbalanced, as financial SROs such as FINRA transform from “self-regulatory” into “quasigovernmental” organizations. We describe this change through an account that describes how SROs are losing their independence, growing distant from their industry members, and accruing rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicative powers that more closely resemble governmental agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. We then consider the confluence of forces that might be driving this increasingly governmental shift, including among others, demographic changes in the style and size of retail investments in the securities markets, the one-way ratchet effect of high-publicity failures and scandals, and the public choice incentives of regulators and the compliance industry. The process by which such self-regulatory organizations shed their independence for an increasingly governmental role is an undesirable but largely inexorable development, and we offer some initial ideas for how to forestall it. * Respectively, Associate Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law and Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. Funding for this paper was provided through a grant from the CME Group Foundation, which was established by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Trust. BECOMING THE FIFTH BRANCH

Firms without boards: unleashing the Hayekian firm

This chapter argues that a board of directors, a mandated feature of all public corporations in the United States, may not be consistent with the Hayekian notion of spontaneous order. A board of directors can be viewed as a form of central planning and suffer from the same defect of central planning: its inability to effectively harness dispersed knowledge for decision-making. The recent notorious failures of corporate governance, such as those of Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers and AIG, suggest that boards of directors may, indeed, be a creature of government regulation and would not exist to the same degree, if at all, in a free market.

Judicial Noncompliance with Mandatory Procedural Rules under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act

Section 21D(c)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act subjects courts to an unusually clear mandate: courts must make findings on whether attorneys complied with Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which sanctions frivolous or unsupported claims) in every case arising under the act. Yet we find that courts make these required findings less than 14 percent of the time. We also find that the required Rule 11 findings are not more likely in cases where parties seek sanctions under Rule 11 but are made overwhelmingly in court orders approving settlements—the circumstance in which sanctions are least likely. To explain these surprising results, we offer an account of judicial behavior that emphasizes judicial learning, judicial effort, and the crucial ways in which the incentives of the judge and of the attorneys may interact in complex cases.