After the destructive impact of the global financial crisis of 2008, many believe that pre-crisis financial market regulation did not take the "big picture" of the system suffciently into account and, subsequently, financial supervision mainly "missed the forest for the trees". As a result, the...

Reform of financial regulation is a priority on the international agenda. At the call of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a number of new international standards have been issued, most notably Basel III. As a member of the G-20, the Financial Stability...

Several commentators have argued that financial “reform” legislation enacted after a market crash is invariably flawed, results in “quack corporate governance” and “bubble laws,” and should be discouraged. This criticism has been specifically directed at both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act...

This report identifies a set of policy lessons for China today drawn from the experience of financial deregulation, financial crisis and recovery in Scandinavia during the period 1985-2000. Although there are considerable differences between the huge Chinese economy and the small Nordic...

With the introduction of Basel II in 2004, “market discipline” became one of the Basel Committee's three pillars of prudential regulation. Although many academic papers have sought to test for the presence of effective market discipline in banking, few have dealt fully with the question....

I study central supervision of local financial regulators in an economic union. Regulators each privately observe benefits from lenient local macroprudential policies. Separate deposit insurance funds allow no discretion to set policies because, with integrated financial markets, regulators...

Inadequate regulation of the financial system is widely thought to have contributed to the financial crisis. The purpose of the book is to articulate a framework within which financial regulation can be analysed in a coherent and comprehensive fashion. The book's approach is distinctive in...

This paper studies how financial intermediation varies across banks. Bank size is a first-order determinant of banks' capital structure in the cross-section. Largest banks have the lowest capital-to-asset ratio and the lowest ratio of Tier-1 capital against risk-weighted assets. These large...

Last decade's financial crisis sparked a flurry of new banking and finance regulation, highlighted by the Dodd–Frank Act and changes to housing finance. There is a growing realization among policy experts that that regulation has largely flopped, doing little to improve the financial system's...