The following post comes to us from John C. Coffee Jr., Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law at Columbia University Law School.
For a number of years, commentators have noted that securities “reform” legislation seems to be passed only in the wake of major stock market crashes, with this pattern dating back to the South Sea Bubble. Some have argued that this pattern demonstrates the undesirability of such legislation, arguing that laws passed after a market crash are invariably flawed, result in “quack corporate governance” and “bubble laws,” and should be discouraged. Recently, this criticism has been directed at both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act. The forthcoming Cornell Law Review article, The Political Economy of Dodd-Frank: Why Financial Reform Tends to be Frustrated and Systemic Risk Perpetuated, presents a rival perspective. Investors, it argues, are naturally dispersed and poorly organized and so constitute a classic “latent group” (in Mancur Olson’s terminology). Such latent groups tend to be dominated by smaller, but more cohesive and better funded special interest groups in the competition to shape legislation and influence regulatory policy. This domination is interrupted, however, by major crises, which encourage “political entrepreneurs” to bear the transaction costs of organizing latent interest groups to take effective action. But such republican triumphs prove temporary, because, after the crisis subsides, the hegemony of the better organized interest groups is restored.