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Presenter: Maia Mints

Faculty Sponsor: Kevin L. Young

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Business & Economics

Session: Poster Session 1, 10:30 AM - 11:15 AM, Auditorium, A74

ABSTRACT

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 introduced the U.S. securitization industry to unprecedented public scrutiny and government intervention, as securitized products became central to financial stabilization measures and legal reforms. Statutory reconfigurations took form in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. While Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)—structured pools of diversified debt securities—never fully rebounded from their losses, their corporate-loan-backed counterparts, Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs), have emerged as a central pillar of current credit markets. While research has documented the scale and mechanics of CLO markets, less attention has been paid to the political design of their statutory governance. This paper examines whether the statutory construction of CLO governance in Dodd-Frank reflects differentiated forms of structural power—influence derived from a firm’s position within financial markets—operating across legislative and regulatory arenas. Using a mixed-methods design, the study combines qualitative process tracing of securitization provisions with quantitative structural power analysis. Legislative records are used to reconstruct institutional access points and forms of participation, including testimony, lobbying, and commentary. The quantitative component measures how structural prominence—the relative position of firms within financial markets—relates to instrumental activity in predicting preference attainment, assessed longitudinally via content analysis of stakeholder positions at access points, and increase in structural prominence, extended to downstream rule-making. Preliminary research suggests that structurally prominent actors demonstrate higher levels of instrumental engagement, while preference attainment is more pronounced among firms in lower-salience, highly technical domains during rule-making.