Differences in financial systems are often named as a prime candidate for the current state of global imbalances. This paper argues that the process of capital liberalization can explain a substantial fraction of the US net external liabilities. We present a simple two-country model with an...

This survey reviews the literature on the political economy of financial structure, broadly defined to include the size of capital markets and banking systems as well as the distribution of access to external finance across firms.The theoretical literature on the institutional basis for...

We use the introduction and the subsequent removal of the flash order facility (an actionable indication of interest, IOI) from the NASDAQ as a natural experiment to investigatethe impact of voluntary disclosure of trading intent on market quality. We find that flashorders significantly improve...

A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

The paper discusses financial liberalization in the context of a proposed RP-US FTA. It discusses the state of the financial industry, in general, and also reviewed the US-Chile and US-Singapore FTAs to be able to arrive at the proposed provisions for the RP-US FTA. It also tackles the reforms...

In the context of recent commodity price hikes, a political consensus has emerged on regulatory measures to reduce excessive speculation in commodity derivative markets. This paper gives an overview of current reform proposals of commodity derivate market regulation at the international (G20),...

We review the major provisions of Dodd-Frank, focusing on the monitoring of systemic risk, the limitation on proprietary trading, the regulation of the hedge fund industry, credit rating agencies, and the rules applicable to derivative trading. We compare these provisions with the recent...

This paper discusses the regulatory license view that reliance by regulators on the output of rating agencies in the 1930s caused the agencies to become a central part of the fabric of the US financial system. Exploring pre-1930 court records, we find evidence of a growing reliance on the...