Javier Paz Valbuena

Javi is a Departmental Lecturer in Law and Finance, and a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Law. His research focuses on government intervention in situations of corporate distress and its effects, particularly in terms of transfers of wealth among different stakeholders (including taxpayers and society at large). He is a dual-qualified lawyer in England & Wales (solicitor) and Spain (abogado). He has been part of the teaching team for Corporate Finance Law, Principles of Financial Regulation, and Law & Economics of Corporate Transactions (BCL/MJur and MLF) since MT 2022. He is currently serving as Research Assistant for the Oxford Digital Assets Project.

Prior to embarking in his DPhil, Javi was a London-based investment and corporate finance advisor. Before then, he was an investment professional with a London-based pan-European real estate private equity firm. He also worked briefly for McKinsey in Madrid during his MBA. He began his professional career as a corporate/M&A lawyer with Uria Menendez in Madrid; he practised there from 2002 until 2009, being involved in some of the landmark transactions in the Spanish private equity market and in the first round of mergers of the Cajas de Ahorros.

Javi holds undergraduate degrees in Law (Licenciatura en Derecho) and Economics & Management (Licenciatura en ADE) from ICADE E-3, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, an MBA (Finance & Accounting) from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an MSc in Taxation from the University of Oxford.

Javi frequently publishes pieces relating to his research on bailouts. His most recent working paper, on bailouts and the US scholarship on public interest in Chapter 11, was selected for presentation at the Harvard-Wharton Insolvency and Restructuring Conference, held on 20-21 September 2024.

He has also written more practical articles discussing the Siemens Gamesa bailout of November/December 2023 (together with Prof. Horst Eidenmueller, published by Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsrecht) or the Credit Suisse bailout of March 2023 (also with Prof. Horst Eidenmueller, published by EBOR).

His theoretical paper on bailouts, Towards a Principled Approach for Bailouts of COVID-distressed Critical/Systemic Firms (with Prof. Horst Eidenmueller, published by the South Carolina Law Review) may be found here. Javi presented it at the 4th Law and Macroeconomics Conference organised by Yale Law School, QMUL and the Bank of England on 27-28 October 2021.