The Defects of Nigeria’s Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act 2017 and Their Potential Repercussions on Access to Credit: a Comparative Analysis and Lessons from the Anglo-American Law

It has been sufficiently established in law and finance literature that an effective legal framework that governs non-possessory security transactions is a key component in the realization of financial inclusion and affordable access to credit in market economies. Recently, the Nigerian lawmakers enacted the Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act 2017 (STMA), which was modelled after the United States’ Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC Article 9) and its unitary-functional approach to security interests. Arguably, some of the STMA’s provisions are defective: they do not reflect the local conditions in Nigeria and are likely to frustrate its section 1 aim of broadening access to credit for individuals and small businesses. The STMA recognizes registration as the main method of perfection: yet there are multiple but unlinked movable collateral registries in Nigeria which ultimately constitute a breeding ground for secret liens. This article argues that the relegation of other perfection methods, such as ‘possession’ and ‘control’, will diminish the economic success of the reformed law. It calls for a reconsideration of the rules governing publicity and the perfection of security interests under the STMA with insights and lessons from the UCC Article 9 and its underlying case law.

Advanced Introduction to Comparative Legal Methods

Drawing on historical, normative, theoretical, and economic methodologies, Pier Giuseppe Monateri offers a fresh critical analysis of various dimensions of comparative law methods. Comprehensive and engaging with a multidisciplinary approach, this Advanced Introduction spans the fields of comparative legal studies, law and finance and global law.

The Laws of Finance For a Sociology of Finance and Law Entanglement

In this special issue, we unpack law and finance entities and consider their co-construction, entanglement and interchanging relationship. Adopting a processual sociology lens, we aim to connect micro-technical devices and controversies to the macroscopic big picture of financialized capitalism. We combine analytical tools from pragmatic sociology, emphasizing how social reality and institutions are (re-)enacted through trials, with a dynamic and historicized sociology of the state and the juridical field. Four avenues illustrate our research program on the sociology of financial law. First, we focus on how this juridical space is co-produced by public and private forces, organizations and initiatives. Second, we look at how financial law displaces and endogenizes core regalian purposes traditionally associated with the state. Third, we show the forms of asymmetries that pervade law enforcement in financial cases. Fourth, we address how power intervenes in normal and exceptional times, such as financial crises. The legal and financial co-production of political regimes shapes economies and legitimate forms of social distribution.

Principles and Practice of Explainable Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides many opportunities to improve private and public life. Discovering patterns and structures in large troves of data in an automated manner is a core component of data science, and currently drives applications in diverse areas such as computational biology, law and finance. However, such a highly positive impact is coupled with a significant challenge: how do we understand the decisions suggested by these systems in order that we can trust them? In this report, we focus specifically on data-driven methods—machine learning (ML) and pattern recognition models in particular—so as to survey and distill the results and observations from the literature. The purpose of this report can be especially appreciated by noting that ML models are increasingly deployed in a wide range of businesses. However, with the increasing prevalence and complexity of methods, business stakeholders in the very least have a growing number of concerns about the drawbacks of models, data-specific biases, and so on. Analogously, data science practitioners are often not aware about approaches emerging from the academic literature or may struggle to appreciate the differences between different methods, so end up using industry standards such as SHAP. Here, we have undertaken a survey to help industry practitioners (but also data scientists more broadly) understand the field of explainable machine learning better and apply the right tools. Our latter sections build a narrative around a putative data scientist, and discuss how she might go about explaining her models by asking the right questions. From an organization viewpoint, after motivating the area broadly, we discuss the main developments, including the principles that allow us to study transparent models vs. opaque models, as well as model-specific or model-agnostic post-hoc explainability approaches. We also briefly reflect on deep learning models, and conclude with a discussion about future research directions.

Ayat-Ayat Hukum dalam Alquran Mengatur Hubungan Sesama Manusia

This study aims to reveal the legal verses in the Koran, especially the legal verses about human relationships (habluminannas) that have been written in the Koran, as a guide or reference for Muslims. Especially in the case, the number of verses regarding muamalah law is relatively small, especially when compared to the law verses on worship. While the development of life seems to continue to change. while the verse has no changes and additions. This research was conducted with literature study, data collection techniques using documentation techniques with data analysis, namely content analysis. The results show that the verses of muamalah law are classified into 7 (seven) sections, including those related to family law, civil law, criminal law, procedural law, administrative law, economic law, and finance. The verse of law regulates fellow human beings or muamalahs which provide little opportunity for Muslims to implement muamalah activities in accordance with the guidelines contained in the Koran and Hadith, if not explicitly explained it is supported by other legal products such as ushul fiqh and kaedah- fiqh principles.

The Medium of Exchange in Mergers and Acquisitions: The Cases of Travel Agencies and Tour Operators

The choice of the means of exchange is one of the critical decisions in mergers and acquisitions. Travel agencies and tour operating-industries compete in a volatile environment, and in addition to generating economies of scale, investments in the industry involve important sunk costs. This paper’s focus is on the determinants of the medium of exchange in mergers and acquisitions in the travel and tour-operating industries. Previous research on the ‘law and finance’ perspectives argues that some country of origin legal systems offer better investment protection to investors. Accordingly, civil law-based systems offer weaker protection to investors when compared to common-law-based systems. For this purpose, we use a logistics regression to model the determinants of cash in a sample of 750 mergers and acquisitions by combining the research streams above. Our results provide evidence of the relationship between investor protection and the use of cash.

Does the legal origin affect corporate cash holding?

PurposeThe study examines the role of a country's legal system in predicting the corporate cash holdings using a sample of 18 countries inherited with distinct legal traditions. The central point of the study is the comparative assessment of legal frameworks in shaping the corporate finance policies.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ host of regression techniques including dummy variables, panel data regression and Fama–MacBeth regressions to establish the relationship.FindingsThe study results support the idea of “theory of law and finance” that legal tradition is a key factor determining corporate behaviour and policy. In particular, the authors observe that firms operating in civil law systems hold significantly higher cash as compared to their peers from common law systems. Moreover, the authors report that the law system affects the corporate cash holdings through the channels of economic development and shareholder's protection, yet in opposite directions. This is because the authors find that in developed countries where civil law tradition prevails, firms hold reasonably higher cash. Moreover, if the firm belongs to high investors' protection country with civil law traditions, the cash holdings get substantially reduced. Besides, the authors find that the predictability of widely held determinants of cash holdings is not invariant of law traditions, and it holds true also when analysed in conjunction with the financial crisis. Overall, the authors find support for their postulation that corporate cash management policies are likely to be different across legal traditions. The study results are robust to the controls for various firm and country-specific antecedents of cash holdings and to the alternate econometric techniques.Practical implicationsThe study findings would encourage the government and firm policymakers and regulators in strengthening the investor protection rights which would further augment the legal system and firm-specific corporate governance mechanisms. This would mitigate agency issues and managers would be forced to undertake investor-friendly financial policies especially corporate cash holdings which would be resulting into shareholder value maximization.Originality/valueThe study contributes uniquely since the existing literature is largely silent on the role that legal tradition of a country has on the cash holdings of its firms.