Finance Without Law: The Case of China

Can a sophisticated financial market exist without legal protections for investors and creditors? International investors have put trillions of dollars into ?China concepts stocks? and Chinese-issued international bonds over the past two decades, even though these markets to some extent operate extra-legally. In a new paper, Professor Shitong Qiao examines how this anomalous situation came about and the mechanism by which the Chinese state?s reputation has functioned as an alternative to legal protections. In this talk, he will explain how China governs by extra-legality and suggest that this is a new direction for research by scholars of law, social norms, and development.