Research Expertise and Interest

financial regulation, international business transactions

Research Description

Stavros Gadinis’ research examines questions in financial regulation and international business transactions. His work focuses on the relationship between the financial industry and government regulators. His goal is to disaggregate agency bureaucracies and study the interactions between key constituents: agency officials, political appointees, corporate litigators, and finance professionals. His latest paper examines the regulatory response to the 2007/8 financial crisis in 15 key jurisdictions, including the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. He shows that newly created powers were assigned not to independent regulators, such as central banks, but to politically controlled officials, such as treasury secretaries and finance ministers (From Independence to Politics in Financial Regulation, forthcoming CAL. L. REV. 2013).

In The SEC and the Financial Industry: Evidence from Enforcement Against Broker-Dealers, 67 BUS. LAW. 679 (2012), Gadinis examines the SEC’s enforcement efforts towards a key segment of the financial industry, investment banks and brokerage houses, in the period right before the 2007/08 financial crisis. He shows that big firms and their employees fared better than small firms and their employees in important dimensions.

In The Politics of Competition in International Financial Regulation, 49 HARV. INT’L L.J. 447 (2008), he explores why policy coordination was achieved in certain fields (international accounting standards and capital adequacy regulation) but not others (cross-border stock exchange trading and Sarbanes-Oxley auditor regulation). An earlier article, co-authored with Howell Jackson, explores the allocation of regulatory responsibilities to stock exchanges, administrative agencies and central government entities in the eight most influential jurisdictions for securities regulation in the world (Markets as Regulators, A Survey, 80 S. CAL. L. REV. 1239 (2007)).

Before entering into academia, Gadinis practiced corporate law for four years in Europe. His work spanned a wide spectrum of equity and debt transactions, ranging from cross-border mergers and acquisitions, stock offerings, and privatizations, to derivatives, securitizations, and CDOs. In addition to U.S. law, he has worked in transactions that involved the laws of many European countries. Gadinis completed his S.J.D. at Harvard in May 2010. He also holds an LL.M. degree from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a law degree from Aristotle University, Greece.