Now that Congress has passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, regulators promulgating the rules under this new bill must tackle a major problem that the reform bill addresses only indirectly. This is the problem of excessive “leverage” – financing with too...

This paper studies the design of lawmaking and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure. As a potential remedy a regulatory regime is introduced. The major functional...

Financial innovation is inextricably tied to asymmetric information and therefore sets the stage for financial crises. Over history, every truly meaningful crisis has had elements of asymmetric information, particularly affecting innovative financial instruments that are primary market...

September 11 changed the American economy and the global insurance market. The insurance industry no longer covers terrorism risk for "free." The traditional insurance mechanism alone cannot spread the risk of repeated catastrophic losses. Beyond the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 lingers...

This paper provides Russia's financial system forecast to the year 2015. The analysis covers the banking sector, financial markets, public finance, financial system regulation (monetary, budget, investment policy). Among the key factors that influence Russian financial system development, are...

The safety of repurchase agreements (repos) depends on the neoclassical premise that markets are reliable sources of liquidity; repos in practice disprove the theory by generating collateral calls, collateral sales, liquidity events and liquidity-driven losses for repo-borrowing funds and their...

The central problem for financial regulation is reducing systemic risk. Systemic risk is the risk that the failure of one significant institution can cause or significantly contribute to the failure of other significant institutions. This paper addresses the five most important policies for...

The authors use simulations within the BoC-GEM-FIN, the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model with financial frictions in both the demand and supply sides of the credit market, to investigate the macroeconomic implications of changing bank regulations on the Canadian economy....