Despite a heated debate on the perceived increasing complexity of financial regulation, there is no available measure of regulatory complexity other than the mere length of regulatory documents. To fill this gap, we propose to apply simple measures from the computer science literature by...

The first stock exchanges involved government. The modern stock exchange is strangely devoid of government presence, at least in terms of the decision to halt trading. Meanwhile, over two-hundred billion dollars trades each day on the New York Stock Exchange, one of thirteen recognized domestic...

Bank capital regulations are intended to enhance financial stability in the long run, but may, in the meanwhile, involve costs for the real economy. To examine these costs we propose a narrative index of aggregate tightenings in regulatory US bank capital requirements from 1979 to 2008....

Bank capital regulations are intended to enhance financial stability in the long run, but may, in the meanwhile, involve costs for the real economy. To examine these costs we propose a narrative index of aggregate tightenings in regulatory US bank capital requirements from 1979 to 2008....

This papers studies the impact of a financial transactions tax on the trading volume and asset price volatility in a model with heterogeneous beliefs. To model heterogeneous beliefs we follow Kurz (1994, 1997) and restrict the class of beliefs to the subset of rational beliefs. We study a tax...

In standard Walrasian macro-finance models, pecuniary externalities such as fire sales lead to overinvestment in illiquid assets or underprovision of liquidity. We investigate whether imperfect competition (Cournot) improves welfare through internalizing the externality and find that this is far...

Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, this paper analyzes two periods of financial instability connected with financial globalization. The first culminates with the 1929 crisis, while the second characterizes the more recent experience starting from the 1970s. The period in between is...