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...

All conceivable solutions to the internal rate of return equation are shown to have meaning as well as use. Internal rates of return are the units in which value is measured and the quantities of such units. This result implies a single internal rate of return cannot be an investment criterion....

Geoeconomic pressure--the use of existing economic relationships by governments to achieve geopolitical or economic goals--is a prominent feature of global power dynamics. This paper introduces a methodology using large language models (LLMs) to systematically identify the application of and...

This study analyzes the impact of e-governance on corruption using a panel dataset comprising 110 countries over the period from 2003 to 2021. The specific focus of the research is on the relationship between the E-government Development Index (EGDI) and its four components, namely the Online...

We study the design features of disclosure regulations that seek to trigger the green transition of the global economy and ask whether such regulatory interventions are likely to bring about sufficient market discipline to achieve socially optimal climate targets. We categorize the transparency...

We document the structure of firm-bank relationships across eleven euro area coun-tries and present new stylised facts using data from the Eurosystem credit registry -AnaCredit. We look at the number of banking relationships, reliance on the main bank, credit instruments, loan maturity, and...

Using objective measures of investor protections in 170 countries, I establish that the level of investor protection matters for cross-country differences in GDP growth: countries with stronger protections tend to grow faster than those with poor investor protections

Since the IMF launched the data standards initiatives a decade ago, 145 of its 184 member countries have participated. This 80 percent participation rate reaffirms the importance countries place on data transparency in the globalized economy, which the initiatives promote. The wide participation...

We develop the first top-down method to estimate the greenness of financial portfolios, in terms of alignment to the EU Taxonomy for sustainable activities. We also develop a method to estimate, at the same time, the portfolio exposure to climate transition risk. We provide sector-level,...

The transition from the state ownership to market mechanisms in Hungary fundamentally altered the geography of domestic micro, small, and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study investigates the spatial and temporal evolution of owner numbers, using data on all Hungarian SMEs between 1991 and 2019...