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Four PhD students from the School (Tinghua Duan, Weiwei Cai, Cong Wang and Jiafu An) organised the event with support from Professor Jo Danbolt, Dr Wenxuan Hou and Professor Bill Rees and staff from the Research Support Team.

This conference was the first conference focusing on legal institutions held in the UK and attracted a large number of submissions worldwide. The committee short-listed 24 papers for the programme. Delegates were from the United States, Australia, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, including: Professor Robert Krainer from University of Wisconsin-Madison; Professor Vikram Nanda from University of Texas at Dallas; Professor Nathan Dong from Columbia University; Professor Jun Song from University of New South Wales; Professor Farzad Saidi and Professor Qiusha Peng from University of Cambridge. In total, eight sessions focused on topics like alternative legal systems, law and governance, government checks and contracting, etc., and each paper received 10 minutes of discussion and 5 minutes Q&A.

The keynote speaker was Professor Ross Levine from University of California, Berkeley. Professor Levine is the top ten most cited economist in the world according to the latest statistics. He has published numerous influential works on top journals in the world, such as American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Economic Literature. Professor Levine also serves as associate editor of Journal of Development Economics and Journal of Economic Growth. This was his first visit to Scotland.

Professor Levine’s keynote address was about inside trading and innovation. Innovation is crucial for people’s well-being and economic growth. However, theories on the relationship between insider trading and innovation is still debatable. Professor Levine uses cross-sectional data to empirically illustrate that the enactment of insider trading law has a positive impact on innovation, thus making a great contribution to the literature.

Other notable papers included “Alternative legal institutions, xinfang and finance” – alternative legal systems have been largely ignored in previous literature, therefore this paper has the potential to make a significant contribution to the law and finance literature. And similarly, “Growing up without finance” provides a clear causal relationship between financial environment and personal financial health, contributing to the literature on financial influence on individuals and received considerable attention at the Conference.