Biography:

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2011). “The Governing Architecture of a Shadow Financial Market:  Investigating the Interaction of Legal and Extra-Legal Governance Structures at the Regulatory Event Horizon.” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Sociology Association (ASA)—Economic Sociology Session organized by Victor Nee entitled New Institutionalism in Economic Sociology. Las Vegas, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2011). “The Extra-Legal Governance Structure of a Shadow Financial System: A Sociological Investigation of Economic Governance in the Absence of Formal Regulation.” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economic (SASE)—session on Networks: Finance & Society. Madrid, Spain.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2011). “The Avoidance of Law Does Not Lead to an Absence of Law: A Sociological Investigation of Law and Organizations in a Shadow Financial Market.” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of Law & Society Association (LSA)—session on Economic Regulation: Law & Society. San Francisco, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2011). “The Extra-Legal Governance Structure of a Shadow Financial System: A Sociological Investigation of Economic Governance in the Absence of Formal Regulation.” Paper presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the British Sociological Association (BSA)—session on Work, Economy & Society. London, England.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2011). “The Evolution of Corporate Governance: Investigating New Forms of Regulation in the Financial Markets.” Paper presented at the 2011 symposium of Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law & Society. Seattle, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2010). “Governing the Quest for Alpha: Coordination, Regulation, and Contestation in the U.S. Hedge Fund Market.”  Paper presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)—session on Networks: Markets, Firms & Institutions. Philadelphia, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2010). “Defining the ‘Self’ in Regulation: A Socio-Legal Investigation of the U.S. Hedge Fund Market.” Paper presented given at the 2010 Annual Meeting of Law & Society Association (LSA)—session on Economy & Society: Comparative Perspectives on Credit, Banking, and Securitization. Chicago, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2010). “Constructing Governance in The Shadow Financial System: An Empirical Investigation of Social Institutions and Structures in the Hedge Fund Market.”  Paper presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS)—session on Financial Markets and Regulations. Cambridge, United States of America.

Suchman, Mark C., Todd Arthur Bridges and Sue Monihan (2009). “The Organizational Response to HIPAA: An Analysis of the Views of Health Privacy Officers,” The Governance of Health Information Technology Project, Project Report. Providence, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2008). Controlling Capital: The Role of Social Structure in the Financial Markets. Brown University PhD Qualifying Paper. Providence, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2006). Embedding Intellectual Property Rights in Social Relations: A Macro-Micro Theoretical Model. Brown University Master's Thesis. Providence, United States of America.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2005). "Trends in International Migration within the OECD Member Countries." Project report given to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), International Futures Program. Paris, France.

Bridges, Todd Arthur (2002).  "Preliminary Findings on the Linkage between Infant Mortality and Education in Early Twentieth Century Chicago." Center for Population Economics at The University of Chicago, Working Paper No. 2002-3. Chicago, United States of America.

Dissertation Title:
The Governing Architecture of a Shadow Financial Market:  Investigating the Interaction of Legal and Extra-Legal Governance Structures at the Regulatory Event Horizon

Since the 1980s, the shadow financial system has exponentially grown in size and has supplanted the traditional banking system as a dominant source of credit and liquidity for the U.S. economy. As the 2008 financial collapse revealed, however, the formal institutional environment--the rules issued by the state and monitored by federal administrative agencies--has limited authority over the financial organizations within this shadow financial system. As a result, entire sectors of the U.S. economy operate beyond traditional law and regulation—at the regulatory event horizon—and pose systemic risks to the broader economy and society. My research project consists of a multi-stage, multi-method empirical investigation into how a governing architecture is being constructed within one of the most influential and powerful markets in the shadow financial system. Specifically, the U.S. hedge fund market is an important social laboratory because it offers qualities of a pseudo-natural experiment wherein the formal regulatory structures that operate in the traditional financial system have been removed, leaving organizations the opportunity to create their own governing architecture. The empirical data come from 4 years of fieldwork, 40 semi-structured interviews with expert informants, and a comprehensive alternative investment fund database. The empirical results from my investigation reveal a complex set of interacting formal and informal governance mechanisms, which operate at the intra and inter organizational dimensions of the market. For example, data analysis revealed that although most hedge funds avoid the formal law and regulation issued by the state, the avoidance of law does not lead to an absence of order within the organizations or the broader organizational field. To the contrary, this formally “unregulated” market has become ordered and institutionalized by the interaction of legal and extra-legal governance structures, and has developed well-defined governance failures.

The project provides policymakers and federal regulators empirically-based insight into how powerful and opaque financial organizations in the shadow financial system avoid the formal institutional environment, govern in the absence of formal law and regulation, and have created a number of governance failures—which can potentially be mitigated to protect the U.S. economy and society. At the same time, the project provides sociologists and economists an empirically-based social laboratory to advance a theoretical understanding of how organizations actively construct governance structures within a shadow financial market, how informal governance structures are interrelated with the formal institutional environment, and how the interaction of multiple governance mechanisms converge to create a governing architecture with well-defined governance failures.