We study the efficiency of banking regulation under financial integration. Banks freely choose the jurisdiction where to locate their activities and have private information about their efficiency level. Regulators non-cooperatively offer any regulatory contract that satisfies information and...

There is a general consensus that the root cause of the most recent turmoil in the domestic and global markets is due to a failure in our regulatory system. Yet, Congress has not supported comprehensive regulation related to the day-to-day activities of mortgage brokers and their relationship...

We address a three-period model of fi nancial intermediaries that involves securitization of risky loan assets, leverage, and asymmetric information. We show that the risk retention requirement with a fi xed ratio, stipulated by the Dodd-Frank Act, might induce losses of social welfare in the...

The SEC regulates and standardizes information production in financial markets through financial reporting standards. With a novel dataset exploiting institutional features of the standard setting process. On average, standards increase aggregate market value by 0.93%, although discord among...

We develop a dynamic model of banks whose insiders have superior information about the impact of a pending shock to the bank’s cash holdings and can signal the bank’s type through its dividend policy. Banks that will be adversely affected by the shock have incentives to pool with unaffected...

The incidence of mis-selling, fraud, and poor customer service by retail banks is significantly higher in areas with higher proportions of poor and minority borrowers and in areas where government regulation promotes an increased quantity of lending. Specifically, low-to-moderate-income (LMI)...

I develop a structural model of mortgage demand and lender competition to study how leverage regulation affects the equilibrium in the UK mortgage market. Using variation in risk-weighted capital requirements across lenders and across mortgages with differential loan-to-values, I show that a...

During the past forty years, the simultaneous, symbiotic growth of financial innovation, disintermediation and deregulation has created an environment with extremely complex, opaque investment instruments. That system has now collapsed. At the very center of the crisis are a small group of...

This is a summarized and abridged version of some of the arguments made in the report “OpenTradeCloud: Regulating the Next Generation of the National Market System” [Summary Report], that is part of my doctorate research at Columbia Law School. It is still very rough and preliminary, and it...

This paper, a chapter in the forthcoming Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate law, describes the leading research related to credit ratings, and assesses regulatory proposals related to ratings, including those in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. It explains how rating agencies have...