Civil liability of rating agencies has to strike a balance between over-deterrence and overly lax behavior control. The resulting problems of a capital market freeze and difficulties of proof, as they become apparent in most legal systems and the European Commission's Draft Proposal to amend the...

Financial regulation is a much debated topic for some time. The history of financial instruments started at a time when people started giving value to physical objects over and above its inherent utility. Right from the very beginning of their existence, it has been acknowledged that financial...

This essay, based on the author's presentation last September to the annual meeting of the North American Securities Administration Association (NASAA), addresses several issues related to Rule 506, the most widely-used of the SEC's transactional exemptions from federal registration of...

An important question in banking is how strict supervision affects bank lending and in turn local business activity. Supervisors forcing banks to recognize losses could choke off lending and amplify local economic woes. But stricter supervision could also change how banks assess and manage...

Drawing on financial reporting, institutional, and social psychology theories, we consider whether awareness of SEC scrutiny affects the extent to which managers exercise financial reporting discretion. Because there is a higher probability that the SEC will detect misconduct and impose...

Many regulators have concluded that cost-benefit analysis is the best available method for capturing the welfare effects of regulations. It is therefore understandable that in recent years, some people have been interested in requiring financial regulators to engage in careful cost-benefit...

Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and legal academia are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific, important, representative rules, and what is the...

Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and legal academia are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific, important, representative rules, and what is the...

This study takes a comprehensive look at the overall flexibility of regulatory governance in Korea, including the design, implementation, and monitoring of the many issues surrounding regulatory reform that stand in the way of innovation growth. Based on the findings of the analysis, the paper...

Credit ratings agencies play an important role in the world-wide capital markets and, willingly or not, influence rather significantly the destinies of private and public financial players and their issues. Credit rating agencies invoke reputation as their most valuable asset and as guarantee...