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 (Madrid, Spain), an MBA (Hons, Finance & Accounting) from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA, USA), and an MSc in Taxation (Distinction) from the University of Oxford (Christ Church).

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.

His most recent article, discussing the Siemens Gamesa bailout of November/December 2023 together with Prof. Horst Eidenmueller, has been published by Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsrecht (ZIP) and has also been included in the ECGI Working Paper Law Series. A summary is available as a blogpost with the ECGI blog (11 December 2023) and the Oxford Business Law Blog (13 December 2023).

A previous article, discussing the Credit Suisse bailout of March 2023 (also with Prof. Horst Eidenmueller), was published by EBOR and was previously included in the ECGI Working Paper Law Series. A summary of the main arguments of this piece is available as a blogpost with the Columbia Law School Blue Sky blog (17 April 2023), which has been picked up by the Oxford Business Law Blog (24 April 2023) and the ECGI Blog (3 May 2023).

See his previous paper on bailouts here (Towards a Principled Approach for Bailouts of COVID-distressed Critical/Systemic Firms, with Prof. Horst Eidenmueller, published by the South Carolina Law Review). He 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.    

Javi is also working on the restructuring of state-guaranteed loans with Vasile Rotaru. They presented their work-in-progress at the INSOL Europe Academic Forum (Dubrovnik, 5-6 October 2022).

Javi served as an Associate Editor of the Oxford Business Law Blog during the academic year 2021-22.