Credit ratings have become an indispensable part of the fundamental information infrastructure of credit markets. Credit ratings cover a wide range of issuers including governments, governmental organizations, municipalities, nonfinancial companies and financial institutions, and also cover...

After the systemic effects of bank defaults during the recent financial crisis, and despite a huge amount of literature over the last years to detect systemic risk, no standard methodologies have been set up until now. We aim to build a concise but comprehensive picture of the state of the art,...

We analyze the effects of a recent financial reform that enables cross-market investment between Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. Using a vector error-correction model, we nd that the reform announcement considerably narrows the equilibrium level of price disparity and strengthens the...

Real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems effect final settlement of payments continuously and on an individual basis. This generates a trade-off between liquidity needs and settlement delay. Against the background of reconstruction discussions, the paper analyses whether more advanced...

This paper describes the Australian experience of domestic financial deregulation, capital account liberalisation and the float of the exchange rate, and provides a comparison to China's current efforts to reform its own financial system. In doing so, it considers similarities and differences in...

On November 12, 1999, President Clinton signed the most significant piece of financial services regulation to be enacted since the Great Depression, at least up to that time. When the Financial Service Modernization Act of 1999, better known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), was signed, the...

The causes of the financial crisis of 2007-09 are many and varied. Indeed, the crisis may be viewed as the product of a perfect storm. This paper identifies the major culprits or sinners of the U.S. crisis and enumerates their more important sins. The culprits include central bankers, commercial...

This paper draws on the progress that has occurred in other areas of regulation -- specifically, the "cap-and-trade" program to control SO2 emissions; spectrum auctions; and "dedicated-access-privilege" programs for fisheries - to suggest that financial regulation would benefit from an expanded...

This paper discusses the SEC's regulation of the bond rating industry. Until a few years ago this specific branch of SEC regulation was largely unknown outside the agency and the bond rating industry itself, even among knowledgeable Washington insiders. But the SEC has actually regulated the...

A dozen years ago, Randall Kroszner, soon to be one of George W. Bush’s economic advisors and a Governor of the Federal Reserve, could comment in a Levy Institute seminar, without fear of contradiction, that there was no evidence to back the "public interest rationale" for the separation of...