About

Kathryn Judge is the Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Her research focuses on banking, central banking, and regulatory design. She has received accolades from academic peers, industry, and others for her work. Judge currently serves as chair of the Research Committee of the European Corporate Governance Institute and is a member of its Working Paper Series Editorial Board. She has served as vice dean for intellectual life at Columbia Law School, as an editor of the Journal of Financial Regulation, and has been involved in various financial stability and research committees, including the Financial Stability Task Force co-sponsored by the Brookings Institution and Chicago Booth School of Business, as well as the Financial Research Advisory Committee to the Office of Financial Regulation, where she co-chaired working groups on financial innovation and LIBOR transition. Her first book, 'Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source,' explores the role of middlemen in modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of direct exchange for fostering connection, community, and a more just and resilient economic system. Prior to her academic career, she clerked for Richard Posner on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. She holds a J.D. from Stanford University and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. In addition to her academic work, she serves as a director for Bread for the World, Bread for the World Institute, and Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, Ltd., chairing committees for each organization.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Finance
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Marketing
• Public relations
• Financial system
• Economy
• Economic growth
• Engineering
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Emergency Lending by the Federal Reserve

  2026-01-23

  articleSenior author

  The Federal Reserve established an array of innovative emergency lending facilities during the Great Financial Crisis and expanded the scope of its emergency lending yet further in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This Article provides a retrospective of how the Federal Reserve used its emergency lending authority across these two episodes, identifying patterns and revealing some differences. It sheds light on the conditions that enabled the Federal Reserve to establish the facilities that it did, including the roles played by Congress and Treasury in providing the equity funding that made certain facilities possible. It shows how in each episode, the Federal Reserve supported a whole-of-government response meant to limit the damage inflicted by a massive shock to the economy while still maintaining its independence with respect to monetary policy.

  Publisher

• Emergency Lending by the Federal Reserve

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Regionalism and the Federal Reserve Banks

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of Bank Supervision: From Eccles to Bessent

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Throughout his tenure as chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Marriner Eccles pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to over­haul bank supervision. Eccles eventually made his ongoing service as chair contingent on FDR agreeing to support the effort. This initiative is commonly depicted as a power grab. Federal bank regulation and supervision, then and now, is divvied up among three agencies, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Comptroller of the Currency. Eccles wanted the Fed, and the Fed alone, to be the federal bank supervisor. Having already succeeded in enhancing his power once, by spearheading reforms that increased the authority of the Federal Reserve Board, Eccles sought to replicate his success and expand his domain yet further, or so the tale is often told. In Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America, Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta show that this is just one piece of the story, and the full account provides valuable insights into this phenomenon called supervision. Understanding the rationale behind Eccles’s ambitions also holds lessons for the current moment, revealing just how powerful and malleable bank supervision can be, why the industry’s current effort to remake supervision could backfire, and why those taking up arms to defend supervision may come to regret that decision. Conti-Brown and Vanatta show that supervision is a powerful tool. It can and often has been used to meaningfully enhance the health of banks and the banking system. Yet they further show that it can and has been used to serve other agendas as well, potentially making it very attractive to an administration looking to deploy such tools in new and sometimes self-serving ways.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Brandeisian Banking

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Unraveling of the Federal Home Loan Banks

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Credit, Crises and Infrastructure: The Differing Fates of Large and Small Businesses

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Handbook of Financial Stress Testing

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 26 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Finance

  Stress tests are the most innovative regulatory tool to prevent and fight financial crises. Their use has fundamentally changed the modeling of financial systems, financial risk management in the public and private sector, and the policies designed to prevent and mitigate financial crises. When financial crises hit, stress tests take center stage. Despite their centrality to public policy, the optimal design and use of stress tests remains highly contested. Written by an international team of leading thinkers from academia, the public sector, and the private sector, this handbook comprehensively surveys and evaluates the state of play and charts the innovations that will determine the path ahead. It is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary resource that bridges theory and practice and places financial stress testing in its wider context. This guide is essential reading for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on financial risk management and financial regulation.

  DOI

• Stress Testing during Times of War

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-02-25 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the spring of 2009, the United States was mired in the greatest recession it had faced since the Great Depression. In March, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen to 6,594.44, a total decline of 53.4 percent from its peak in the fall of 2007. The official unemployment rate was over 9 percent and still trending upward, eventually exceeding 10 percent. With the support of Congress, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and other financial regulators had launched an array of initiatives to contain the fallout of what had become a global financial crisis. These interventions, including a massive recapitalization of US banks and the effective elimination of large, independent investment banks, had succeeded in stabilizing much of the financial system, but full functionality remained elusive. The crisis had revealed significant deficiencies in the banks’ risk management systems and the capacity of regulators to detect those weaknesses. Fear and distrust remained the order of the day.\nAgainst this background, the Federal Reserve and other bank regulators took a gamble. On May 7, 2009, they publicly announced the results of the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP). As then-chairman Ben Bernanke explained, “the SCAP marked the first time the US bank regulatory agencies had conducted a supervisory stress test simultaneously across the largest banking firms” (Bernake, 2013). The Fed further deviated from tradition in its decision to disclose the results of the SCAP. In providing an unprecedented level of detail regarding the methodology and inputs used in reaching those results, the Fed challenged the assumption that bank supervision should always be shrouded behind a thick veil of secrecy. Both gambles paid off. As Bernanke later observed: “The SCAP stands out ... as one of the critical turning points in the financial crisis. It provided anxious investors with something they craved: credible information about prospective losses at banks” (Bernake, 2013).

  PublisherDOI

• MILLSTEIN CENTER‐ECGI CONFERENCE ON: Board 3.0: Bringing the Private Equity Model to Public Companies

  Journal of applied corporate finance · 2021-09-01

  article

  In a recent conference organized by Columbia Law School's Millstein Center and the European Corporate Governance Institute, law and econ scholars Jeff Gordon and Ron Gilson discuss with other academics and a remarkably varied and distinguished group of practitioners the possibility of “porting” elements of the private equity governance model to public companies to achieve what they describe as “Board 3.0.” The public company “monitoring” boards of the recent past—composed for the most part of part‐time, “thinly informed,” and “boundedly motivated” directors dependent upon corporate management for information about the company—are seen as evolving toward the “thickly informed, well‐resourced, and powerfully motivated” directors that Gordon and Gilson see as required to function more like “partners” in the business, helping steer management toward the long‐run value‐maximizing strategic and operating decisions. A number of the board members on the panel serve, or have served, on private as well as public companies. The consensus among this group was that PE boards function at higher levels than their public counterparts, accounting in significant part for the higher returns of PE. But as this group also noted, an ongoing “migration” of PE board members and practices to public companies, accomplished in part by reverse LBOs and PIPEs (private investments in public equity), is leading to more effective public company oversight and governance. Along with deeper specialized knowledge of critically important operational issues, PE directors are also said to have a comparative advantage in designing pay‐for‐performance incentives for operating managers. What's more, as one panelist pointed out, PE's need to focus on and prepare for “exit” from day one has the paradoxical effect of sharpening managerial attention on the long‐term future and the amount and kinds of investment needed to ensure it.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Marco Pagano

  University of Naples Federico II

  12 shared

• Ricardo Prado Abreu Reis

  Universidade Federal de Goiás

  7 shared

• Sandra S. Wijnberg

  Hispanics in Philanthropy

  5 shared

• Luca Enriques

  5 shared

• Kristin van Zwieten

  Clifford Chance

  5 shared

• Horst Eidenmueller

  European Corporate Governance Institute

  4 shared

• Todd H. Baker

  Center for Law and Social Policy

  3 shared

• Gert‐Jan Boon

  3 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Wesleyan University

  1999

• Other

  Stanford Law School

  2004

Awards & honors

• Gold Medal for Business Theory from Axiom Business Book Awar…