The 2021 Wallenberg Lecture is taking place on 28 October 2021, online. The lecture, which will be delivered by ;Roberta Romano (Yale University and ECGI), will develop on Prof. Romano's earlier lecture series following the global financial crisis, which advocated a serious, comprehensive reassessment of financial regulation after a fixed period. With the benefit of information regarding the impact of regulatory alternatives available at the time of such a reassessment, errors and mismatched solutions that resulted from crisis-driven legislation can be reconsidered and rectified.

The lecture will review the components of what Prof. Romano terms the “iron law of financial regulation” - that following a crisis, legislators will act despite its being an importune time regarding the availability of information regarding a crisis’ causes and corresponding solutions, creating a complex, regulatory ratchet, increasing costs that can have adverse unintended consequences, and then provide preliminary findings regarding the empirical  foundations for the iron law.

Prof. Romano is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. Her research has focused on state competition for corporate charters, the political economy of takeover regulation, shareholder litigation, institutional investor activism in corporate governance and the regulation of securities markets and financial instruments and institutions. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ECGI Fellow, a research associate of the National Bureau for Economic Research, a past President of the American Law and Economics Association and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, and a past co-editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. She is a recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the William & Mary Law School’s Marshall-Wythe Medallion, and is the author of The Genius of American Corporate Law (1993) and The Advantage of Competitive Federalism for Securities Regulation (2002), editor of Foundations of Corporate Law, 2d ed. (2010) and co-editor with Shen Wei, of Financial Regulation After the Global Financial Crisis: US and China Perspectives (2017) (in Chinese).

The lecture will be discussed by ;Franklin Allen, Professor of Finance and Economics and Executive Director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London, and ECGI Fellow. He was formerly Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and Managing Editor of the Review of ; He is a past President of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Society for Financial Studies, the Financial Intermediation Research Society and the Financial Management Association, and a Fellow of the Econometric ;