Abstract

John Armour was appointed to the Lovells Professorship in Law and Finance at Oxford University, in association with Oriel College on 1 July 2007, having previously been a University Senior Lecturer in Law and Fellow of Trinity Hall at Cambridge University. He studied law (MA, BCL ) at the University of Oxford before completing his LLM at Yale Law School and taking up his first post at the University of Nottingham. He has held visiting posts at various institutions including Pennsylvania Law School, the University of Bologna, and Columbia Law School. Within the TEG Seminar, John will present results from an investigation of the relationship between bankruptcy laws and entrepreneurship using data on self-employment over 16 years (1990–2005) and fifteen countries in Europe and North America. He will compile new indices reflecting how “forgiving” personal bankruptcy laws are and will show that bankruptcy law has a statistically and economically significant effect on self-employment rates when controlling for GDP growth, MSCI stock returns, and a variety of other legal and economic factors.