In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, U.S. authorities are attempting to improve financial regulation and supervision. This involves a three-step process: (1) diagnosis of what went wrong, (2) design regulatory and supervisory reforms that address these defects, and (3) implement the...

Introduction -- Regulating finance is hard to do -- Incentives run amok -- How U.S. regulators encouraged the financial crisis -- American crisis? Ain't necessarily so -- Been down this road many times before -- More of the same: post 2007-2009 financial crisis regulation -- Making the guardians...

In this paper and the associated online database, we provide new data and measures of bank regulatory and supervisory policies in 180 countries from 1999 to 2011. The data include and the measures are based upon responses to hundreds of questions, including information on permissible bank...

This paper assesses the impact of the geographic diversification of bank holding company (BHC) assets across the United States on their market valuations. Using two novel identification strategies based on the dynamic process of interstate bank deregulation, we find that exogenous increases in...

This paper provides the first comprehensive documentation of the main features of corporate bond issues in domestic and international markets and analyzes how firms use these markets after they internationalize. We find that debt issues in domestic and international bond markets have different...

Analysis of a panel data set for 1976-1998 shows that on balance stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth - findings that do not result from biases induced by simultaneity, omitted variables, or unobserved country-specific effects.Beck and Levine investigate the impact of...

We evaluate the role of insider ownership in shaping banks' equity issuances in response to the global financial crisis. We construct a unique dataset on the ownership structure of U.S. banks and their equity issuances and discover that greater insider ownership leads to less equity issuances....