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www.szgerzensee.chFoundation of the Swiss National Bank

LAW AND ECONOMICS COURSES FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS AND FACULTY MEMBERS 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 3

Program 3

Courses 4-5

Funding and Organization 6

Admission 6

Contact 6

Location 6

Photo: Nina Weibel-Lottonen

Design: Gerber Druck AG, Steffisburg

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Law and Economics Courses for Doctoral Students and Faculty Members 2020

The Study Center Gerzensee, Foundation of the Swiss National Bank, opened its doors in 1986 to serve as an international training and conference center for economists and central bank staff. Based at an old manor in the heart of Switzerland, the Center features state-of-the-art seminar rooms as well as a fully equipped hotel, restaurant, and sports facilities. High-ranking members of the Swiss National Bank, the Swiss government, and the academic and business communities serve on the Center’s Foundation Council and the Advisory Committee for Education and Training. Academics actively engaged in research direct the Center and manage its programs. The faculty is composed of the Center’s own staff, leading scholars from

INTRODUCTION

around the world, and specialists from the Swiss National Bank and other partner insti-tutions.

Over the last decades, doctoral students, faculty members, and other interested indi-viduals from Switzerland and abroad have participated in the Study Center’s Law and Economics Courses for Doctoral Students and Faculty Members. The courses cover topics in law and economics that vary from year to year. They target doctoral students, faculty members, and other interested indi-viduals who seek advanced training in law and economics to understand and conduct first-rate academic research.

In 2020, the Study Center is offering two Law and Economics Courses for Doctoral Students and Faculty Members. This bro-chure lays out the program, introducing the course contents and lecturers. It also pro-vides information on funding, organization, and admission.

I hope you will find the program attractive. At the Study Center, we are looking forward to welcoming curious and ambitious course participants to Gerzensee.

Dirk NiepeltDirector

Governance and Regulation of Blockchains and FinTechDavid Yermack, New York University Stern School of BusinessMarch 30–April 3

Law and Economics of Liability and Enforcement for Corporations and IndividualsJennifer Arlen, New York UniversitySchool of LawMay 25–29

PROGRAM

A typical course day includes classroom lectures of three hours as well as exercise review sessions or office hours to discuss thesis projects. Course weeks typically start on Monday at 10:30 a.m. and end on Friday at noon. Participants obtain a certificate.

Optionally, they may take an exam; upon request, the Study Center reports the grade to the participant’s university. It is the re-sponsibility of participants to obtain credit with their universities.

www.szgerzensee.ch

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GOVERNANCE AND REGULATION OF BLOCKCHAINS AND FINTECH

MARCH 30–APRIL 3

This course will introduce students to the new discipline of FinTech, with a focus on the application of blockchain technology to digital currencies and payment systems, smart contracts, identity management, and numerous other emerging applications. While financiers since the Renaissance have continually sought to apply technology to financial markets, a radical change occurred in 2008 with the publication of Nakamoto’s proposal for the first successful cryptocur-rency, Bitcoin, which was built on top of an innovative new financial ledger known as a blockchain.

Within its first few years, Bitcoin created novel legal problems, such as how to enforce financial regulations against decentralized networks that are governed by consensus protocols with no identifiable leadership. Governments around the world have been forced to consider the legal status of self-ex-ecuting smart contracts, the property rights accruing to owners of cryptographic assets, and the boundaries of existing bodies of law in areas such as banking, securities, money transmission, and consumer protection. A fast-growing practice area has emerged in "blockchain law," and jurisdictional compe-tition has begun among countries that vari-ously seek to encourage or exclude FinTech applications from existing markets.

Blockchains have also created novel prob-lems in private regulation, such as the governance of permissioned blockchain networks, the organization of global, de-centralized mining pools, and the initiation of hard forks that can create spontaneous divisions within communities of users. New entities such as crypto asset exchanges have grown quickly and have often been sus-ceptible to hacking and fraudulent trading schemes.

In this course, we will survey the foun-dational literature of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, smart contracts, consensus protocols, initial coin offerings and related regulatory issues. Applications of FinTech in areas such as corporate finance, central banking, investment management, real es-tate, supply chain management, and the

authentication of luxury goods and fine art will also be studied. In many classes we will contrast the regulatory approaches to cryp-tographic assets with the legacy approach-es used in securities, banking, and other statutory frameworks, and we will make numerous international comparisons. While some knowledge of game theory, computer programming, and cryptography would be helpful for understanding this interdisciplin-ary subject area, the course will be taught from a Law and Economics perspective and will introduce these more technical topics at an elementary level.

David Yermack is the Albert Fingerhut Pro-fessor of Finance and Business Transforma-tion and chairman of the Finance Depart-ment at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1994. He is also an ad-junct professor of Law at the NYU School of Law, director of the NYU Pollack Center for Law and Business, and a research associate of the NBER Law and Economics program. In 2014, David Yermack began teaching a full semester course at NYU on "Digital Cur-rency and Blockchains" with his Law School colleague Geoffrey Miller. The course was the first in the world on this topic taught at a major research university, and it now draws more than 200 students annually. He has taught shorter versions of the course at several universities in Europe and Australia. He has presented his FinTech research at numerous international universities, NGOs, and regulatory agencies including the Unit-ed Nations, BIS, OECD, U.S. Treasury, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, In-ter-American Development Bank, World Bank, and the U.S. Public Company Ac-counting Oversight Board. David Yermack earned his AB in Economics (1985) from Harvard College, MBA (1991) from Harvard Business School, JD (1991) from Harvard Law School, and AM (1993) and PhD (1994) degrees in business economics from Har-vard University, where he wrote his disserta-tion under the supervision of Andrei Shleif-er. Before becoming a full-time academic he worked as a management consultant and financial journalist.

David YermackNew York University

Stern School of Business

Law and Economics Courses for Doctoral Students and Faculty Members 2020

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LAW AND ECONOMICS OF LIABILITY AND ENFORCEMENT FOR CORPORATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS

MAY 25–29

This course is designed for PhD students and academics interested in issues relating to the optimal structure of liability for a wide range of harms including: torts (including medical malpractice and products liability), corporate and individual liability for crimes and regula-tory offenses (including money laundering, corruption, environmental offenses, and se-curities fraud), compliance, and whistleblow-ing.

This course differs from other courses on law and economics of liability in that it recogniz-es that most torts and crimes involving large harm are not committed by autonomous individuals. Instead, they are committed by people employed by, and acting on behalf of, corporations. As this course demonstrates, we must alter the framework we employ when harms/misconduct are caused by em-ployees of firms because firms are defined by imperfect information about (and imperfect control over) the behavior of the actors with-in the firm. This course shows how recogniz-ing this alters the central purpose of liability —whether for torts, crimes, or regulatory violations—and in turn leads to conclusions that differ from those of the classic model.

The course begins with the classic law and economic analysis of torts (including prod-ucts liability and medical malpractice), crime, and corporate liability. We next explore the economics of principal-agent relationships, focusing on lessons for scholars of economic analysis of the firm. Using this analysis, we develop a new framework in which imperfect information and imperfect control play a cen-tral role.

During the last few days we’ll apply these insights to the study of liability for torts, crimes, and regulatory offenses. We will start with medical malpractice and product liabil-ity. We then will consider corporate liability for crimes and regulatory offenses—the use of deferred prosecution agreements and other non-trial corporate resolutions in the U.S., U.K. and France. We also will examinenon-legal sanctions, including reputationalsanctions. Finally, we will examine superviso-ry liability and bounties.

Students should leave the course with a new set of tools that they can use to make

Jennifer ArlenNew York University

School of Law

important contributions in their own areas of research. Jennifer Arlen will be available to meet with students about their own research projects in the afternoon.

Jennifer Arlen is the Norma Z. Paige Profes-sor of Law and the faculty director of both the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement and the Center for Law, Eco-nomics and Organization at New York Uni-versity School of Law. She is an internation-ally recognized expert on corporate criminal enforcement, torts and medical malpractice, and experimental law and economics. She has served as the president of the American Law and Economics Association and helped create and served as the president of the So-ciety for Empirical Legal Studies. She currently serves on the editorial board of the American Law and Economics Review and is the asso- ciate reporter for enforcement for the Ameri- can Law Institute’s Principles of Law, Com-pliance, Enforcement, and Risk Management for Corporations. A prolific scholar, Jennifer Arlen has published three edited volumes including the "Research Handbook on the Economic Analysis of Torts" (2013) and the "Research Handbook on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing" (2018). She also has published articles in the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Law and Eco-nomics, the Journal of Law Economics and Organization, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Legal Analysis, the Yale Law Journal, Chicago Law Review, New York University Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Three of her arti-cles were selected by the Corporate Practice Commentator as one of the three best arti-cles in corporate and securities law. Jennifer Arlen earned her BA from Harvard University (magna cum laude in Economics) and ob-tained a JD and PhD in Economics from New York University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Phyllis Kravitch on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. She has been a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, Harvard Law School, and Yale Law School, and was the Ivadelle and Theo-dore Johnson Professor of Law and Business at USC Gould School of Law before coming to NYU. Jennifer Arlen teaches corporations, business crime, and a seminar on corporate crime and financial misdealing.

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FUNDING AND ORGANIZATION

The program is heavily subsidized. The course fee for students or faculty members affiliated with a university or other research institution amounts to CHF 400, and for other participants to CHF 1’400. The fee is non-refundable. It covers tuition as well as

FUNDING AND ORGANIZATION

the cost of a single or double room with full board. For information about the hotel ser-vices, see the website of the Study Center’s hotel (www.hotelschlossgerzensee.ch). The restaurant offers meat, fish, and vegetarian meals and caters to special diets.

Participants are responsible to obtain visas for their entire trip including transit destina-tions; after admission, the Study Center may issue an invitation letter upon request. No accompanying persons are admitted.

The Study Center invites Swiss universities and the Swiss National Bank to nominate candidates. It also invites individuals who are not affiliated with a Swiss university or the Swiss National Bank to apply directly to the Study Center. As space is limited, the Center cannot admit all qualified applicants. Repeat applications are possible.

Applicants must be enrolled in a doctoral program or must have completed their PhD.

Candidates affiliated w ith a Swiss universi-ty or the Swiss National Bank should submit a completed application form to the rep-resentative at their home institution listed below. The form can be downloaded from the Study Center’s website (www.szger-zensee.ch). Other candidates should submit the completed application form to the Study Center.

ADMISSION

Representatives:ETH Zurich, Stefan BechtoldSwiss National Bank, Carlos LenzThe Graduate Institute, Pauwelyn JoostUniversity of Basel, Markus ScheferUniversity of Bern, Susan EmmeneggerUniversity of Fribourg, Jean-Baptiste ZuffereyUniversity of Geneva, Luc ThévenozUniversity of Lausanne, Christian ThoeniUniversity of Lucerne, Klaus MathisUniversity of Neuchâtel, Valérie Défago GaudinUniversity of St.Gallen, Katrin KrehanUniversity of Zurich, Hans Caspar von der Crone

Deadlines:Candidate affiliated with Swiss university or Swiss National Bank submits application form to representative: January 10, 2020.

Other candidate submits application form to Study Center: January 17, 2020.

Study Center communicates admission decision: End of February, 2020.

Participant pays fee: February 28, 2020.

All mail as well as inquiries should be addressed to:

Study Center Gerzensee, Law and Economics Courses for Doctoral Students and Faculty Members, Ms. Nina Weibel-Lottonen, Dorfstrasse 2, CH-3115 Gerzensee, Switzerland, Tel: +41 31 780 31 09, e-mail: nina.weibel@szgerzensee.ch

CONTACT

LOCATION

Study Center GerzenseeDorfstrasse 2, 3115 Gerzensee, Switzerland