Between the recent exits of several insurers from the health insurance exchanges, and the repeated attempts earlier this year to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, there has been much concern about the stability of the individual insurance market. This seminar will examine the sources and scope of individual market instability and review current proposals for market stabilization, while exploring how federal or state level subsidized reinsurance programs, including “invisible high risk pools,” might help.health insurance|insurance

Financial “robo advisors”—automated services that rank, or match consumers to, financial products on a personalized basis, sometimes in addition to selling or providing educational information about these products—have gained significant attention in the investment industry. But there has not yet been a consensus on how to regulate them. Robo advisors have the potential to equal or exceed the quality of human advisors, but they don’t fit into the category of fiduciary, and therefore are not currently held to the same regulatory standard that humans advisors are. Nonetheless, they are subject to systemic risks and the potential for abuses that can hurt consumers. This seminar will explore the regulatory challenges involved in fostering a market that promotes the development of more sophisticated robo advisor technology while also serving and protecting the heterogeneous interests of financial product consumers.finance|regulation

A wave of corporate inversions over the past several years has generated substantial debate in academic, business, and policy circles. The core of the debate hinges on a couple of key economic questions: Do US tax laws disadvantage US-domiciled companies relative to their foreign competitors? And, if so, does inversion reduce or eliminate that tax disadvantage, and increase the competitiveness of US multinational firms for making investments both abroad and at home? This seminar will address these questions and their implications for tax reform discussions, drawing insight from newly published research.tax