Capital Markets Regulation

Stocks and bonds are investments in businesses. Investors can buy and sell these investments. This course is about the rules that make that trading possible. Capital Markets Regulation examines how the law constitutes our capital markets (such as rules regulating the New York Stock Exchange) and controls abusive trading practices (such as insider trading).

However, this is not just a course about the law, because the legal rules regulating capital markets would be impossible understand and evaluate on their own. The institutional context of stock trading is very far from the life experience of most students, so this course will introduce this context, identifying the various actors (for example, high frequency trading firms and dark pools) that build and use the capital markets. The motives of these actors can be confusing, so this will be steeped in economic analysis, in order to see stock trading as some stock traders see it. Technology is also a part of the story – from the Robinhood app to fiber optic cables – so we will learn a little about that too. This course is a mixture of law, public policy, and economics.