This paper investigates whether political connections affect individuals' propensity to engage in illegal activities in financial markets. We use the 2007 French presidential election as marker of change in the value of political connections, in a difference-in-differences research design. We...

This paper investigates whether political connections affect individuals' propensity to engage in illegal activities in financial markets. We use the French 2007 presidential election as a plausibly exogenous change in the value of political connections in a difference-in-differences...

This paper investigates whether directors' political connections affect their behavior in financial markets. We conjecture that directors feel protected by their political connections, which translates in lower perceived enforcement probability. We use the French $2007$ presidential election as...

Pre-World War I Belgium was characterized by a strong concentration of power in the hands of a small elite with ties to business, banks, and politics. We find that political and upper class connections were widespread amongst listed firms, especially connections with the ruling political party....

This paper examines banks' disclosures and loss recognition in the financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. Our analysis suggests that, going into the financial crisis, banks' disclosures about relevant risk exposures were...

This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in...

This paper is the outcome of a related broader project, exploring the explanatory power of the Legal Theory of Finance, which proposes a new institution-based analytical framework for the analysis of phenomena of financial markets. One of its most important theoretical assumptions, the legal...

The concept of regulatory systemic risk – a long-term imbalance, resulting from the misalignment between regulatory initiatives and market realities, that impacts multiple areas of the regulatory framework – is developed in the context of US securities regulation. The discussion offers two...

In this Article we submit that the compensation structures at banks before the financial crisis were not necessarily flawed and that recent reforms in this area largely reflect already existing best practices. In Part I we review recent empirical studies on corporate governance and executive pay...