Commentary by faculty and affiliates of the Duke Law Global Financial Markets Center
The COVID-19 pandemic and associated global economic shutdown roiled financial markets around the world during the spring of 2020. The usually placid municipal securities market was not immune from this disruption. Initially, investors flocked to municipal securities to de-risk portfolios in response to the growing pandemic, pushing prices higher and bond yields to record lows. […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of the way that individuals engage with banking and payment tools, including various FinTech services. There are several reasons why the pandemic might have accelerated the adoption of FinTech and other digital platforms in payments by consumers and financial institutions. The pandemic may have led to an increase […]
The rise of FinTech is one of the most critical developments in finance over the past decade. One important FinTech development is initial coin offerings (ICOs), whereby investors can purchase blockchain-based cryptocurrencies directly from entrepreneurs. To those new to the crypto world, ICOs provide a mechanism to raise external funding through the issuance of digital […]
Since its emergence in December 2019, there have been more than 20 million COVID-19 infections worldwide, with at least five million confirmed cases in the United States (Roser et al., 2020). Individuals and business entities suffered severe loss of revenues and disrupted supply chains due to industry shutdowns and restrictions on movement and commerce. Policymakers […]
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) recently issued a proposed “true lender” rule.[1] The proposed rule would establish a two-part test for determining whether a national bank or federal savings association “makes a loan and is the ‘true lender’ in the context of a partnership between a bank and a third party, […]
At this time, numerous initiatives are attempting to provide citizens with a digital form of central bank money, referred to as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). CBDC promises many benefits for citizens, such as providing a risk-free means of payment, preserving monetary sovereignty in light of the growing usage of private cryptocurrencies, and strengthening the […]
Earnings management is the use of accounting methods by managers to manipulate financial statements in order to inaccurately convey the financial performance of their company. Earnings management is costly to stakeholders and society because it decreases the informativeness of earnings thereby distorting the economic efficiency of the stock market. Moreover, earnings management can also potentially […]
COVID-19 is primarily a health and human crisis which has evolved into an ever expanding economic crisis, but not yet a large scale financial crisis. So far, the financial sector has been central to directing financial resources to support economies and societies while governments battle the pandemic. As the length and depth of the economic […]
Cooperative compliance (CC) programs are tax audit regimes that replace conventional, ex-post tax audits, with real-time cooperation between firms and tax authorities. According to the OECD, CC is based on mutual trust, transparency, and cooperation and should provide benefits for both sides. First, tax authorities benefit from increased compliance. Because CC-firms are at low risk […]
Short selling has been viewed as a market mechanism that can potentially disincentivize firms’ opportunistic behaviors such as negative information suppression, as short sellers take actions when they detect the hidden bad news. Extant studies have provided evidence that short selling can help deter management from suppressing negative information in developed economies. However, in emerging […]