I describe the challenge of fully integrating securities markets in Europe by integrating the clearing and settlement functionalities. The initial condition is characterized by a multitude of standards, conventions, regulation and laws, which are inconsistent with a barrier-free post-trading...

As barriers to international investment fall and technology improves, the cost advantages for a firm's securities to trade publicly in the country in which that firm is located and for that country to have a market for publicly traded securities distinct from the capital markets of other...

We investigate the causes and consequences of financial regulation by studying the political economy of U.S. state usury laws in the 19th century. We find evidence that usury laws were binding and enforced and that lending activity was affected by rate ceilings. Exploiting the heterogeneity...

Conventional wisdom has it that global financial markets were as well integrated in the 1890s as in the 1990s, but that it took several post-war decades to regenerate the connections that existed before 1914. This view has emerged from a variety of tests for world financial capital market...

Accounting for the pervasive evidence of limited international risk sharing is an important hurdle for open-economy models, especially when these are adopted in the analysis of policy trade-offs likely to be affected by imperfections in financial markets. Key to the literature is the evidence,...

Personal bankruptcies in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from 1.4 per thousand working age population in 1970 to 8.5 in 2002. We use a heterogeneous agent life-cycle model with competitive financial intermediaries who can observe households' earnings, age and current asset...

We examine whether the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 increased the information content of corporate earnings disclosures. Prior research questions whether the Act improved disclosure quality but generally relies on long-window tests and yields mixed results. We focus on whether the Act...

In contrast to bonds, levered loans do not require SEC registration. We show that this distinction plays an important role in firms' choice between funding through loans and bonds and helps understand why the market share of cov-lite loans has increased so much. Compared to cov-heavy loans,...

The 1964 Securities Acts Amendments extended the mandatory disclosure requirements that had applied to listed firms since 1934 to large firms traded Over-the-Counter (OTC). We find several pieces of evidence indicating that investors valued these disclosure requirements, two of which are...

We examine the effect of securities laws on stock market development in 49 countries. We find almost no evidence that public enforcement benefits stock markets, and strong evidence that laws facilitating private enforcement through disclosure and liability rules benefit stock markets