Consolidation in the financial industry threatens competition and increases systemic risk. Recently, banks have seen both high-profile mergers and spectacular failures, prompting a flurry of regulatory responses. Yet consolidation has not been as closely scrutinized for clearinghouses, which...

Legislation takes place slowly and incrementally, much like evolution. Ideas in one field get transferred to others. New mutations and new fusions take place with apparently dissimilar partners creating a need for other adaptations. Such a fusion is now occurring between the banking industry and...

The Dodd-Frank Act, enacted after the global financial crisis, requires U.S. financial regulators to define and regulate systemically risky firms and activities — a truly Sisyphean task. In this Essay, we identify two paths regulators have taken: a “descriptive approach,” which involves...

This paper examines the over thirty proposals to consolidate U.S. federal financial regulators since 1915. It examines why most of these proposals failed and what parts of these proposals were implemented. This paper was prepared for the Volcker Alliance as background for its project on...

In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers introduced a draft version of a guidance document that purported to clarify the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act in accordance with recent Supreme Court Cases. Shortly thereafter, it became clear that the Draft Guidance...

The EU recently established new supranational financial supervision authorities — ESAs — capable of adopting binding supervisory decisions. The upgraded regulatory framework also inaugurated judicial review by a newly established Board of Appeal and the Court of Justice against these...

Transnational regulatory networks play important roles in multi-level regulatory regimes, as e.g, the European Union. In this paper we analyze the role of regulatory networks from the perspective of the economic theory of legal federalism. Often sophisticated intermediate institutional solutions...