In this paper, we study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may lead to a reduction in corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to Italian municipalities with less than 5,000 inhabitants that occurred in 2013. Using...

Extant research finds that announcement-period abnormal returns of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) equity investments in publicly traded firms are positive but lower than those of comparable private investments. We investigate the determinants of this “SWF discount” and mitigating mechanisms. We...

This paper proposes that whether interconnectedness among banks leads to financial instability depends on banks' leverage decisions. It extends the network model in Allen et al. (2012) to study the relationship between interconnectedness and the banks' failure probability. In the model, banks...

Using a unique data set, this paper studies the governance of anti-money laundering supervisors known as Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). Starting from a theoretical framework that highlights four key properties of FIU governance – financial powers, law enforcement features, independence...

We analyze the time-varying nature of the price discovery process in the sovereign debt market over the sample period January 2006 – September 2015. In particular, we test whether the cointegration relationship that should tie bond and CDS spreads together holds over the entire sample. In...

The growth of financial markets provokes regular debate, particularly in Europe, and in the aftermath of the global crisis a number of reforms have been proposed. In particular, two regulatory measures have been put forward: order-to-trade ratios and transaction taxes. This paper aims to...

At first glance, today's global economic outlook gives plenty of ammunition to the critics of central banks. Take the euro area – though its problems are by no means unique – where notwithstanding a strongly expansionary monetary stance, inflation is persistently low, growth is weak, and the...

This paper examines myopic, populist policies that guarantee short-term financial protection of the people from the elite without regard for long-term fiscal or monetary distortions. Assuming that citizens are financially heterogeneous, this paper shows that inefficient outcomes can arise when...

One of the fundamental issue in implementing the twin peaks regime is deciding where the prudential supervisor should be housed, given that so far three options has been explored, i.e. the prudential supervisor could be outside the central bank, or be a subsidiary of the central bank, or be...