Ryan Bubb

Visiting Professor of Law
Last Updated: July 11, 2025

Ryan Bubb is a Visiting Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law.  His areas of research encompass corporate law, law and economics, and regulatory policy.

Bubb joined the NYU School of Law faculty in 2010, serving as the Robert B. McKay Professor of Law. He is a former senior researcher at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and a policy analyst at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. In addition, he has held visiting professor, visiting scholar, or visiting fellow positions at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, UC Berkeley School of Law, the University of Chicago School of Law, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Bubb has taught courses in corporate and securities law and in law and economics. In 2014, he was awarded the Podell Distinguished Teaching Award at NYU Law.

A widely cited scholar, Bubb has published over a dozen articles in law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals, including legal and economic analyses of the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 (e.g., “Securitization and Moral Hazard: Evidence from Credit Score Cutoff Rules,” 63 J. Monetary Econ. 1 (2014), with Alex Kaufman“Regulating Against Bubbles,” 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1539 (2015), with Prasad Krishnamurthy“Regulating Motivation: A New Perspective on the Volcker Rule,” 96 Tex. L. Rev. 1019 (2018), with Marcel Kahan), analyses of the implications of behavioral economics for policy design (e.g., “Consumer Biases and Mutual Ownership,” 105 J. Public Econ. 39 (2013), with Alex Kaufman“How Behavioral Economics Trims Its Sails and Why,” 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1593 (2014), with Richard H. Pildes“An Equilibrium Theory of Retirement Plan Design,” 12 Am. Econ. J.: Econ. Pol’y 22 (2020), with Patrick L. Warren); and an empirical analysis of how mutual funds vote their shares in portfolio companies (“The Party Structure of Mutual Funds,” 35 Rev. Fin. Stud. 2839 (2022), with Emiliano M. Catan).

Bubb received his BS in physics from the College of William and Mary in 1998. After graduating with a JD from Yale Law School and an MA in economics from Yale University in 2005, he began doctoral work in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2011.

Education

  • PhD (Political Economy and Government), Harvard University, 2011
  • MA (Economics), Yale University, 2005
  • JD, Yale Law School, 2005
  • BS (Physics), College of William and Mary, 1998